Trials and Triumphs 

An Autobiography 

By REV. W. T. TARDY 




Class rB2(^_±3. S" 

Book_jr3_A^ 



COaKIGHT DEPOSm 




REV. W. T. TARDY 
(Before he was stricken) 



Trials and Triumphs 

An Autobiography 

BY 

REV. W. T. TARDY 



WITH A FOREWORD BY 

REV. GEORGE W. TRUETT, D.D. 



EDITED BY 

J. B. CRANFILL, LL.D. 



MARSHALL, TEXAS 

MRS. W. T. TARDY, Publisher 



.^ 









Copyright, 1919, by Mrs. W. T. Tardy 



©CI.A5154!)7 

APR 26 1 9 IS 



^0 

"The Wonder Woman," 

MY BELOVED WIFE, 

whose unselfish Love has cheered 
my weary hours and whose tender 
care has so often chased away my 
pain, this book is affectionately 
dedicated by 

The Author. 



FOREWORD 

By REV. GEORGE W. TRUETT, D.D. 

It has not been my privilege to read the chapters of this 
book, for which I am writing this foreword, and yet I count 
it a privilege, even before reading the book, to give it my 
most cordial commendation, because of my personal knowl- 
edge of its nobly brilliant author, the Rev. William Thomas 
Tardy. 

That prince of preachers and teachers. Dr. John A. 
Broadus, after an interview that he once had with the 
world-famed inventor, Mr. Thomas A. Edison, said, "I was 
doubly anxious to see Mr. Edison, because the man himself 
is always greater than anything he can say or do." Such 
saying may preeminently be applied to the author of this 
Autobiography. Brilliant and challenging and inspirational 
as its chapters will be to all who read them, their author 
was himself far greater than anything he ever said or did. 

He has been an outstanding man from the early morn- 
ing of his manhood. His life has been wide-reaching in 
its inspiration and helpfulness, even from the days of his 
youth. His range of reading was wide, and his opinions 
and convictions were always clearly and fearlessly ex- 
pressed. Vast numbers eagerly awaited his utterances, 
whether from his pen or tongue, and were greatly profited 
by them. Both as a speaker and as a writer, he possessed 
extraordinary gifts. As a minister of the Gospel of Christ 
and as a citizen of the State, his brilliant powers were unre- 
servedly dedicated to the good of his fellows and the glory 
of his Master. 

His life and labors take on a still more challenging 
meaning when it is remembered that for years he was 
sorely afflicted, so much so that he had to dictate all his 
writings and to make all his addresses from an invalid's 
chair. The spell and blessing of his patriotic and Christian 



FOREWORD 

messages, thus delivered, will long and consciously burn 
in the hearts of great audiences all over the land. 

Through all his afflictions, his energy and optimism and 
courage and faith were undaunted, and his activities in 
behalf of every good cause grew in intensity until the very 
last hour of his earthly pilgrimage. During his last weeks 
and days the chapters of this book were dictated, his bril- 
liant mind glowing at a white heat and his faith in Christ 
shining out with constantly increasing certitude and tri- 
umph, until his spirit left the wearied body to be at home 
with his Lord in the Father's House above. The story of 
the final, wonderful hours of the earthly life is told by his 
exceedingly helpful and devoted wife in a final chapter of 
this volume, which wife the honored husband characterized 
as *'The Wonder Woman." 

Very earnestly would I here express the hope that this 
book may have a vast circulation, and that speedily. This 
hope is voiced not only because the proceeds from the sale 
of this book will give practical aid to the brave widow 
and the fatherless children, but also because the book will 
undoubtedly carry a large blessing to all who may read it. 
It will cheer the suffering, encourage the struggling, 
enhearten the weary, challenge and inspire old and young 
alike to lives of 'maximum deeds and invincible spirit, and 
it will glorify Him whom the author so passionately loved 
and served, and it will go on doing these good things after 
the author, like David of old, has served his own generation 
by the will of God and fallen on sleep. 

Pastor's Study, 
First Baptist Church, 
Dallas, Texas. 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

Even before I disposed of the Texas Baptist Book House 
to the Baptist Standard Publishing Co., I had been in cor- 
respondence with my beloved friend and brother, the author 
of this autobiography, concerning the publication of this 
work. He had not at that time completed it, nor indeed, 
as I learned afterwards, had he begun it ; but it was on his 
heart for many months, suggested in part, as I believe, by 
my own autobiography, a copy of which I sent him soon 
after it was published and many copies of which he dis- 
tributed among his friends. Finally, when his book was 
nearing completion, he wrote me again and this time more 
urgently concerning the early publication of the work. 
There was in his letter a note of appeal that I could not 
have resisted if I would, and would not have resisted if I 
could. Long ago I recognized W. T. Tardy as one of the 
brilliant men of Texas. He had few equals on the platform, 
even after his torn and twisted body was so afflicted that 
he could not stand as he spoke. He was a man of tireless 
energy, of remarkable brilliancy of mind, of earnest, affec- 
tionate, and enduring friendship, and of sincere and loving 
devotion to the Master. Many times I turned my hand 
to writing a tribute to him while yet he was with us, but 
like many another Christian task, well planned, I waited 
too long, and now the tribute I meant to pay him is but 
feebly expressed in the words here penned. 

Those who have never been afflicted cannot sympathize 
with those who suffer. I have heard many a man with 
bright, well, strong eyes commiserate those whose eyes 
had failed ; but even in the very flood-tide of their generous 
expressions, these dear friends were unable to enter into 
the sorrows of the blind, or of the man who, all his life 
long, has loved and lived in books and yet who is cut off 
from reading them. It is generous of the strong and well 
to voice expressions of sympathy for those who suffer 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

and are sad, but none of us can really enter into an afflic- 
tion that we ourselves have never known. No juror under- 
stands the meaning of a sentence of imprisonment. It is 
easy for him to vote to send a man to prison for twenty- 
five, or twenty, or fifteen, or ten, or five years, but he 
cannot possibly measure the long drawn-out torture and 
suffering of the contemplated incarceration. I saw W. T. 
Tardy many times during his affliction, and I had seen him 
many other times during the period of his great and glowing 
health. I thought that I entered into his sufferings, but 
I know I never had fully entered into them until his last 
letter came to me, urging me to hurry with this manuscript 
and get it to the printers at once, adding, "I am weak, weak, 
weak!'' Even then I hoped he would be spared until the 
book could be published, but on the very day that the 
manuscript was being mailed to the printers, he gently 
fell asleep and went on to be with Christ. 

I have known many brave sufferers who battled against 
tremendous and seemingly overwhelming odds, but I never 
knew a braver one than W. T. Tardy. Even when his body 
was racked with pain, his wonderfully brilliant mind seemed 
to soar and cleave the skies. Never shall I forget the tor- 
rential eloquence that fell from his lips after the beginning 
of the great war, when he came to our own city and poured 
out his heart to us concerning the issues that had been thus 
so tragically precipitated. Despite his great affliction, he 
smiled his way happily along, cheering others as he went, 
and giving each and all whom he met words of encourage- 
ment and hope. He was a patriot to his heart's core and 
was glad to give his two sons that they might go to the 
scene of blood and carnage and, if need be, sacrifice their 
lives on the altar of liberty. In the last chapter of this 
volume he speaks tenderly of their return, but I know full 
well that he would have willingly given both to the cause 
he so dearly loved if their lives had been needed to save the 
world from the march and martyrdom of German tyranny. 

I am happy in the thought that my promise to print this 
book brought cheer and gladness to his closing hours. His 
wife wrote me that when he had my letter telling him that 
I would attend to all the details of publishing the book, 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

finance it, and advance every penny of the money, he never 
worried any more. I was so anxious that he should see 
the completed volume, but that was not to be. And now, 
as I close these words, I lay my tribute of love and friend- 
ship upon his new-made grave, hoping and believing that 
the work he left behind will help and cheer countless thou- 
sands of others who have themselves known affliction, pain, 
and sorrow as did he. 

J. B. Cranfill. 




REV. W. T. TARDY 
(After he was stricken) 



TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 



CHAPTER I 
BIRTH AND ANCESTRY 

I was born in southeastern Arkansas in June of the early 
seventies. That Arkansas was my native State is accidental, 
providential, or both. My father, a middle-aged country doc- 
tor and farmer, was treking from war-stricken and poverty- 
ridden Mississippi toward the salubrious climate of southwest- 
ern Texas. East of the Mississippi River in the Confederate 
States the fiercely contending battle forces had wrought unprec- 
edented havoc. Property was entirely swept away. The abso- 
lute overthrow of the existing social state had dazed and be- 
numbed the masterful whites. Carpet-bag and scalawag rule 
and consequent negro domination caused a continuous west- 
ward exodus of former slaveholders who could not endure the 
galling and humiliating conditions of the radically changed 
social order, nor could they readjust their industrial and eco- 
nomic ideas and activities with sufficient celerity to meet the 
exigencies of the new and baffling burdensome life thrust upon 
them. Therefore, the endless stream of westward-bound pil- 
grims. My parents had no sort of intention of making Arkansas 
their permanent home. Bandera County, Texas, was the desti- 
nation; but the distance, the poverty of the pilgrims, and the 
travel-weariness caused them to strike tent and abide a while on 
the first hill this side the bottoms of the Delta. Deep stakes 
were never driven down, neither were the borders of the habita- 
tion enlarged. Temporariness was written over everything 
and the rolling plains of Texas billowed invitingly to every eye. 
There was nothing remarkable about my advent into the world, 
save that I was born in a rude and quickly constructed shanty 
that was called "The Soot House," from the fact that the wind 
blew the smoke against the walls and blackened them. Two 

1 



2 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

years later my brother, now an officer of distinction in the 
United States Navy, was born in a fairly respectable white- 
washed boxed house. The glaring contrast between our birth- 
places was often cause for quarrels of no little acerbity and 
many juvenile pugilistic encounters. 

On my father's side I am of French descent. In a letter 
from Rev. Reuben Saillens, the great superintendent of Baptist 
work in France, he tells me that our name is thoroughly French, 
and that the family probably originated in Normandy. I have 
a pardonable pride in bearing the same name of the great 
writer whom the historian, Guizot, calls the Gallic literary 
genius of his time. My great-grandfather, Alexis Tardy, started 
the family in America. He reached these shores by a stroke 
of daring boyish intrepidity. The wanderlust was in his blood 
and at the age of twelve he secreted himself in a wine cask on 
a sailing vessel bound for America, and never showed himself 
to the officers or crew until the ship was three days out, when 
hunger drove him from his hiding place. Nothing then could 
be done with the adventurous youth but to allow him to finish 
the voyage. Philadelphia became his early home. There he 
married a Welsh girl, and himself became a cunning workman 
in silver and gold, and later settled in the island of Santo 
Domingo. He was residing and prospering here with a young 
family in this black spot of the West Indies when the negroes 
revolted against their masters and perpetrated the massacre 
that is now historic. My grandfather's slaves were kindly dis- 
posed to their master and his family, and they placed them 
safely upon boats bound for the States. 

That revolution under the Southern Cross forced the migra- 
tion of my forebears to the coast cities of Charleston, Mobile and 
New Orleans. To this day I have numbers of distant relatives 
in those cities. This progenitor of the American branch of our 
family, Alexis Tardy, was a Roman Catholic. My father's 
father was brought up as an altar boy and times without num- 
ber bore the robe of the priest in the service of the mass. This 
ancestor, my grandfather, was a graduate of Jefferson Medical 
College at Philadelphia. In some way he settled at Tuscaloosa, 
Alabama, and there married a wealthy planter's daughter, and 
himself became landlord and slave owner. The vitalest thing 
that touched his life here, and thru him the branch of the family 



BIRTH AND ANCESTRY 3 

that sprang from him, was that his marriage brought him in 
contact with personal piety and New Testament religion. He 
foimd himself indissolubly bound up with Baptists of the most 
straightest sect. This association and the power of God did 
their perfect work and since that marriage, the Tardy strain 
that is removed a few himdred miles from the coast, has been 
logically and consistently Baptist or, at least, strongly evangel- 
ical and protestant. 

My father, A. B. Tardy, the first child of his parents, was 
born in Tuscaloosa. He was instructed in the science of medi- 
cine by his cultured father, but by some strange lapse in for- 
tune, or mistake in educational plans, he never attended college. 
Neither father nor son ever made any money out of his pro- 
fession. They did the practice on their several plantations and 
for the neighbors who needed their ministrations, but they did 
not know how to charge nor how to collect. They gloried in 
the professional title of doctor and both were marvelously suc- 
cessful practitioners in the old-fashioned school of medicine. 
I remember very clearly that my father in the country, 
in Arkansas, was regarded as a pneumonia specialist. 
The rural folk said that he and his fly blisters were a dead shot 
against the dread plague of winter. Many is the time that I 
have carried from my mother fresh, cool, thick and delicious 
buttermilk to the emaciated, but convalescent pneumonia pa- 
tie^nts of my father. The children of the household used to say 
that my father practiced medicine for the good and glory of it, 
and made us work like galley slaves on the farm for a living. 

Ours was a mixed family. My mother was my father's third 
wife. He was a middle-aged man and had grown children when 
I was bom. Naturally this aggregation of dissimilar spirits 
and temperaments was not conducive to peace and piety in the 
home. The disruption of my father's home, the scattering of 
the children with the inevitable lack of discipline, and the law- 
lessness consequent upon war and reconstruction, made the 
place of stepmother an exceedingly hard and unenviable posi- 
tion. My mother was Miss Mary S. Vaughan, bom near 
Demopolis, Alabama, on the Warrior River. Since, if strength 
is vouchsafed me, I purpose to devote a special chapter to her. 
I shall not here elaborate upon her history or character. 



CHAPTER II 
EARLY ENVIRONMENT AND LOCAL COLOR 

Drew County is in the southeastern corner of Arkansas, the 
second county from the Mississippi River. ColHns was a small 
village named for General Benjamin Collins, whose wife was an 
aunt of my father. Sprawling over a lob-lolly pine plateau, just 
beyond where the bottom was separated from the hills by Cut 
Off Creek, a stream whose name was both suggestive and ex- 
planatory, there was no natural grandeur, beauty, nor attrac- 
tiveness within miles of our home. The scenery was depressing 
rather than inspiring. The landscape had not a single noble 
feature. There were the pin oak ponds from which the country 
folk got young trees to set out in their yards and white dirt 
with which they made chimneys for their houses. A 
frame chimney made of this dirt worked into the constituency 
of mortar and kneaded into straw was an institution in those 
days and set the owner in a class far above his neighbors who 
had only "stick and dirt" chimneys. When the dirt and the 
straw were worked together into a mass about a foot long, taper- 
ing at both ends, the result was called a "cat," and the "cat" 
was thrown to the chimney builder, who wrapped it around the 
sticks of the wooden frame until there was a mass from the 
ground to the top. This then had white mud smeared over it 
inside and out. The chimneys were serviceable and, if well 
built, almost everlasting and not at all bad looking. 

When I can first remember there was no cooking-stove or 
sewing-machine in our neighborhood. Our kitchen was a rather 
huge affair with dirt floor and big fireplace off in the yard a 
little distance from the house. This is the one building of the 
place, the appointments, uses, and looks of which are indelibly 
impressed upon me. What savory odors came from that big 
fireplace! And what mysteries did the frying pans, ovens, 
skillets, and pots hold ! How the fire glowed and crackled under 
the big ovens and how live, bright, and hot were the coals from 
seasoned bark on the thick and heavy lids. This was all inter- 

4 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 5 

csting to children, especially the bark, for it was the unwritten 
law in every country home that the "chaps" should keep the 
kitchen supplied with bark — and not infrequently the trouble- 
some questions of hungry children during the preparation of a 
meal were answered by cooks : "If you don't shet up, I'll break 
dis bark over your hed !" This outdoor kitchen was the social 
center of the place, especially at evening time. Here middle- 
aged and elderly women and negroes, who were still on good 
terms with the whites, gathered and gossiped. All the tales 
of superstition I know, I learned from the lips of newly emanci- 
pated negroes before the old kitchen fire after supper time. 
Hair-raising "cunjur" yarns and eye- widening and heart-stop- 
ping ghost stories were told again and again until all the little 
fellows trembled in delicious fright. I have sat by the hour 
enthralled by the weird tones and barbaric beliefs of the old 
"Mammies." I was afraid to hear them and loath to forego 
the thrill of the spell. Many a night I would not have gone 
alone the few steps back to the house for all the money in the 
world. 

As the children grew older and progressed in cooking lore 
they could tell by the smell what food was in a utensil that had 
been removed from the fire. Quite often when the mother's 
or cook's back was turned, a trained-nosed and empty-stom- 
ached boy would slyly uncover the vessel and purloin the articles 
of food for which his mouth was watering. Thereby for me 
hangs a tale. One Saturday night my mother had been cooking 
tea cakes. A close watch had been kept on me and my every 
approach to the kitchen door had been detected and each time 
I was driven away empty-handed and clean-toothed. The odor 
of the hot sweet bread maddened me and when the cooking was 
done I skulked into the kitchen, but the cakes had been safely 
hidden and my search was in vain. At length I espied on the 
corner of the hearth the oven that had been used for baking the 
cakes. Cake odor came up from it. This was my chance. 
Nobody was around and my long waiting was to be rewarded 
as I devoured the last installment of the cakes that were left 
to cool. The oven lid had a kind of grayish tinge that should 
have warned even me, young as I was, had I not been so hungry 
and in such a hurry. I seized the handle of the lid with my 
bare fingers, holding it with such nervous tightness that I 



6 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

could not immediately turn the thing loose. My hand was ter- 
ribly burned and right there, for the time being, I lost my ap- 
petite for cakes. I went into the yard, screaming with pain and 
ran upon my grandfather, who happened to be visiting us that 
day. Instead of sympathizing with me in my torture, the little 
gray-haired Frenchman actually slapped me. This is the last 
vivid recollection I have of the old kitchen, but it is unforget- 
table, as it was literally burned into me. 

The character of population here was what might be ex- 
pected from penniless refugees and native squatters in a re- 
mote corner of a rather new and much maligned State. There 
were, indeed, some worthy people who were neighborood assets 
and state builders, but a large proportion of the settlers were of 
an inferior type. There were many dregs and much scum. The 
nondescript or nonclassifiable white man was much in evidence. 
He was hard to rightly appraise. He did not descend from 
slave owners nor from the independent mountaineer of the 
South. Probably the negroes were right when they described 
this class as just "pore white trash." The supreme term of 
opprobrium of the blacks for the whites was "white buceras." 
There was, too, a rather consequential infusion of the criminal 
element. This is not surprising when the state of the country 
is taken into account, and when a survey is made of this back- 
ward section of the land. The civil war had ended, leaving vast 
outlying districts poor, bitter, and discontented. For years dis- 
cipline in the home and in the government had been sadly re- 
laxed. The negro problem was acute. The solvent freedmen 
vaunted their unaccustomed independence. The lower the white 
man, the more he resented the pretensions of the black man. 
Fear of the latter hovered as a lowering cloud over every 
neighborhood and darkened the door of every home. Summary 
and merciless vengeance was reaped upon the offending negro. 
What Carlyle calls the cruelty of fear obsessed the helpless 
whites. The carpet-bagger and political degenerates were 
in the saddle. Our country was represented in the legislature 
by the Honorable (?) Curl Trotter, an illiterate black, and our 
senatorial district had its interest looked after at Little Rock 
by Honorable ( ?) Henry Brooks, a ginger cake negro of rather 
harmless proclivities. When I knew these two retired states- 
men, they were janitors in the Court House at Monticello. 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 7 

The first time I ever stepped into the glistening temple of justice 
i.t Pine Bluff, a large, ebony-hued, former slave was sitting at 
the desk as district clerk. Of course, a white deputy was fur- 
bishing the brains and doing the work. There was thruout 
our country a kind of bastard Ku Klux organization, holding on 
ind functioning long after General Forrest had disbanded the 
ki.ights of the invisible empire. This band successfully sun- 
pressed the outrages of the lawless blacks, while it engendered 
and fostered a defiant and lawless spirit among the ignorant 
and irresponsible whites. 

When the negroes had been subdued, the subduers fought 
among themselves. Cutting affrays and shooting scrapes were 
of common occurrence. The grip of justice in the courts was 
pretty tight and the usual recourse for a poor man after com- 
mitting a crime was to flee the country. For some days the 
hunted fugitive would hide out in the cane brakes of the bot- 
toms or secrete himself in the impenetrable thickets surround- 
ing the cabin of some friends until the peace officers tired of the 
search, then on a horse not well-known to the public, he would 
make his get-away thru Louisiana on to Texas. More than 
once have I seen my relatives and near neighbors carry a sup- 
per of venison steak and bread and potatoes and coffee after 
dark down to the fastnesses of Cut-off Creek. The children 
gazed upon this procedure with undisguised wonder. Nobody 
dared to tell us the purposes of these nocturnal expeditions. 
Natural intuition and the sharpened faculties of childhood's 
inquisitive mind soon divined the truth. I do not think that 
I ever had a pony given me by my father, or that I had raised 
from a colt, that did not mysteriously disappear. The animal 
was sold or loaned to some poor Cain who was fleeing the scene 
of his misdeeds. 

Whiskey was an unmitigated evil. Everywhere the bowl 
went round and the bottle was a boon companion. The liquor 
jug, plugged with a corn cob stopper, was under the bed of 
the master of every house. Eggnogs were the established cus- 
tom. The milder form of toddies was of constant indulgence. 
I have seen whole households with all the guests, both men and 
women and children, tipsy to silliness from too freely imbibing 
the thick and strong eggnog from the capacious bowl. The 
grocery stores in the little towns sold whiskey in addition to 



8 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

that sold by the saloons. The medical fraternity at that time 
regarded alcohol as a food and a stimulant. It was thought to 
be good when the winter was too cold and when the summer was 
too hot — a set off for the chill of the former, and a stimulant 
for the ennui of the latter. Our community did not know that 
there was any poor whiskey. The universal opinion was that 
of the Irishman — it is all good and better. 

The amusements were house-raisings and log-rollings for 
the mature men and women and parties or dances in the winter 
for the young people. The house-raisings and log-rollings were 
of crying necessity, and the social value of the gatherings was 
not to be despised. But the good of the country fandangoes 
was always a debatable question with the best arguments and 
weight of evidence against them. At these entertainments the 
girls flirted flagrantly and the men grew jealous, drank inordi- 
nately, fought and shot. Sometimes tragedies unspeakable were 
enacted at these mid-winter dances. With sufficient reason and 
on ample grounds the minority of careful parents and good 
church people fought the dances to the bitter end. The little 
old town three-quarters of a mile from our house was a place 
of hilarity and dissipation. Bloody encounters were a weekly 
occurrence. Yelling, drunken men came on horseback and in 
wagons by our house every day. Their insane whooping and 
distorted visages made the blood curdle in my frightened little 
body. I well remember standing on the roadside and watching 
a man pass by whose scalp was laid open on one side of his 
head, the freely flowing blood made the left side of his face a 
lurid red. He saw me not, but emitted one drunken whoop 
after another as he soddenly sat his patient horse. The sordid- 
ness of the whole environment was a heart depressant to a 
growing child. My impressionable spirit was wounded to the 
center and my sensitive soul was seared. 

A truly high character never came into my life nor did a 
great man or woman cross my path from the outside up to my 
eighth year when we moved from the place of my birth. All 
of our acquaintances and visitors were ordinary or below. I 
do not remember experiencing an inspirational hour, nor was I 
ever helped in the urge of a great expectancy, or the surge of 
high endeavor. The social atmosphere was murky in the ex- 
treme and sordid beyond belief. In the terrible times thru 



EARLY ENVIRONMENT 9 

which we were going the inner light had failed and there was no 
vision and the people perished. No stalwart preacher of 
prophetic voice and awesome mien called the people to repent- 
ance or charged the well-fortressed bulwarks of hell. We were 
in the spiritual eddies and moral back-waters of civilization. 
We had all the disadvantages of the pioneers, dissociated from 
the heroism of real adventure. The oppressiveness of the de- 
generacy of those early years weighs heavily upon me to this 
day. Loftiness of soul, singleness of purpose, and devoutness of 
spirit were alien to my childhood. Often, my father plowed 
with two pistols buckled around him, and when he fared forth 
on his steed he was a riding arsenal. These arms were not 
carried to meet bearded Huns, nor to slay avowed and brave 
enemies, but for protection against sinister and cowardly foes 
in the neighborhood of his domicile. The ambushed enemy 
might lurk in any fence corner, or under the first dense copse. 
This made life a suffocating agony rather than a joyous expe- 
rience. Idealistic impulses were stifled and altruistic aspira- 
tions were turned into cinders. It is a marvel of grace that any 
of us lived thru it, and a tribute to the tears and prayers and 
faith of our mother that the children finally entered upon careers 
of usefulness and walked in paths of peace. How these 
miracles were wrought will be told in chapters that follow. 



CHAPTER III 

OBSERVATIONS AND INNER EXPERIENCES OF A 

LITTLE BOY 

Nothing can escape the eager vision of a normal and in- 
quisitive child. He is all eyes and ears for everything that is 
new, and for him all things are new. The commonplace is 
lifted to the dignity of romance. He sees things in the delight- 
ful freshness of a new acquaintance, and memories are imper- 
ishable. Mind itself must be destroyed utterly before early 
impressions can be obliterated. Who can fathom the abysmal 
wonders of the mind of a child, and who can read the riddle of 
iiiquiry and the mysterious depth and the mischievous twinkle 
of the eye of a boy? Except for this appetite and his bodily 
pains, a child up to eight or nine years transcends himself and 
his life is an overleaping, outreaching process. When further 
advanced in years there is an intensely selfish and self-centered 
; eriod that gives the gravest concern to parents and teachers as 
to his final destiny. Just at this time I was entering upon that 
childhood era that made investigation a perennial adventure. 
The world of men and women, animals and things, opened new 
vistas every hour and richly rewarded every exercise of body 
and effort of mind. I was the eldest living child of my mother. 
By the time I was eight years old there were five boys in the 
family. Two years spaced the ages between each one. I 
clearly remember when my third, fourth and fifth brothers 
were born. There were always books and papers in the house 
and my parents were great readers. I do not know when I 
learned my letters nor at the exact age I learned to read, but I 
do know that McGufifey's fourth reader was a present to me 
when I was a very little fellow. 

My father was a voluble man. In private conversation he 
was one of the most fluent talkers I have ever known. He was 
the possessor of a wonderful assortment of uncoordinated, gen- 
eral information. He could sit on the porch in summer, or by 

10 



OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIENCES 11 

the fireside in winter and talk to any willing auditor all day or all 
night ; meantime, incessantly smoking his pipe, always using a 
fine brand of "deer tongue" tobacco. But my father was pain- 
fully timid in public. He never made a speech in his life. I 
have seen him second a motion at a conference in a Baptist 
church, and in doing so he always ducked his head and lowered 
his voice. It took me years to catch the blessing that he offered 
at the table, with such embarrassment and rapidity did he re- 
peat it. 

As the oldest child of the younger set, I was forced into out- 
door activities very early. When I learned to ride horseback 
is beyond my ken. I was sent upon errands on my pony long 
before I was able to mount him unaided by any means known 
even to self-reliant country people. Three near-horseback trag- 
edies I vividly recall. One time coming from the mill with a 
sack of ground corn, I essayed to go thru a small gate near the 
house, rather than ride around and open the big barn-like gate. 
The two ends of the sack of meal caught against the opposite 
gate post and the sack and I were left upon the ground with me 
fortunately on top as the pony squeezed on thru. Another time 
I came upon my horse Tom in a long lope to the watering pool. 
The animal stopped suddenly at the edge of the water and I 
went over his head into the middle of the cool liquid. Some- 
body near by rescued me, and I was none the worse except for 
a horrid scare and wet clothes. Later I was racing this horse 
up the road a mile or two from home when he stimibled and 
fell, throwing me out on the roadside, where I lay limp with 
the breath knocked out of me. Had not a passing friend of the 
family picked me up and shaken me to life again, these lines 
would never have been written. 

About this time I became a shepherd boy. My father pur- 
chased various small detachments of sheep and undertook to 
combine them into a flock, of which I had the care. Here I 
learned the sheep nature down to the ground. I have no illu- 
sions about that seemingly mild-mannered brute. My hard 
novitiate as a shepherd has helped me greatly in the interpreta- 
tion of many Scriptures that speak of the saints as the sheep 
of His pasture. I do not think the Lord ever put breath in 
a more vexatious and obdurate grazing animal than this same 
meek and mild-mannered sheep. It was my business to drive 



12 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

the flock to the fields in the morning and to bring them home and 
safely house them in the sheep-cote at night. Things went 
merrily enough so long as the hungry beasts were devouring 
the luscious grass. But so soon as their maws were filled, some 
old bellwether would bleat out his commands and the sheep 
that obeyed his voice would follow at his tail as he made a 
break thru the woods toward the home of his former master. 
That first defection was a signal for general herd-anarchy. 
Universal stampede followed and there was a dispersion that 
left the pasture bare and left me distracted. I hallooed dolor- 
ously, abused my horse terrifically, called for help piteously, 
and usually finished the day worn, thorn-scratched and 
chagrined over my failure to live up to the arduous task assigned 
me. When I did bring home the remnant of the flock and 
attempt to drive them over the stile into the place of secure 
refuge for the night, some old ram, possessed of more evil 
spirits than were ever cast out of Mary Magdalene, would whirl 
around on the topmost step of the stile and go bounding away 
into outer darkness, followed by all the sheep he could control. 
This, when I was dead tired and when I was more afraid of 
the night myself than I was of the menacing threats or sure 
anger of my father. The sequel always came the day there- 
after. The rebellious sheep were found dead, slain by ravenous 
wolves or bands of marauding dogs. Then we had to go out 
and pull the wool by hand from the stiff and swollen bodies 
of the dead sheep. I still adhere to the opinion formed then, 
that that is a job no boy ought to be required to do. The 
obstreperous animals tried our souls in every conceivable way. 
They would go into the brier patches and lose their wool on 
the sharpened ends of fence rails. 

In that day wolves were the highwaymen of the dark. Their 
doleful and blood-thirsty howls made the night hideous. Packs 
would come as near to the house as they dared and howl until my 
father would go out on the porch and shout or fire a shot gun 
to frighten them away. At such times I shivered in bed with 
deadly fear and often have I stuffed the cover in my ears to 
keep from hearing the split-tongued and blood-throated yelping 
of the wild dogs of the forest. Not much over a hundred yards 
down the public road below our house I once saw a wolf in 
broad daylight cross the highway before me. 



OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIENCES 13 

There is, however, a better side to the sheep than the one 
above dehneated. His flesh, when flat, makes delicious mutton, 
which is a food fit for kings. Then the clip of his wool keeps 
the sons of men from freezing. Shearing time was a great occa- 
sion on the farm. The sheep was caught and laid upon a table 
and the fleece was cut very near the skin, beginning at the 
tail of the animal and folded back in great rolls toward the 
head. I have watched the eyes of the patient animals as they 
were being robbed of the coats of their backs and I have seen 
them even not wince when their tender skin was cut again and 
again. And to this day the mute submissiveness of that indis- 
pensable beast brings to my mind the passage, "Like a lamb 
dumb before her shearers. He opened not His mouth." The 
wool was washed and dried and some of it was carried tp the 
market and sold. The remainder was used for family necessi- 
ties. I did not come up in the days when cloth was made 
in the home. But all stockings, socks and gloves and wrist- 
bands used by the household were manufactured there by hand. 
After washing and drying, the wool was carded into rolls; 
these were spun into thread and the thread was knitted into 
garments. My mother used to carve innumerable rolls and 
place them in billowy piles in the corner of the room. 

Then the spining-wheel was brought into requisition. This 
piece of mechanism was a wonder to the children. A large 
wheel axled upon a staff that stood upright from a pony-frame 
that sprawled its chubby legs on the floor, was belted by a cord 
to the spindle in front. The fluffy end of a soft roll of wool was 
placed against the shining point of the steel spindle, the big 
wheel began to turn, and its revolution made the spindle revolve 
with a dizzy ^une. Soon the thread would cover the spindle like 
a comb. This was called a broach. It was rolled into a ball and 
the knitting began. I have beguiled the tedious hours of many 
a long winter night, watching the flash and listening to the click 
of the needles in my mother's hand. The fascination of seeing 
the stocking lengthen under the deft fingers of an expert knitter 
was absorbing enough to drive the sandman from childhood's 
eyes. The only relic of my early home that I would care to 
have is my mother's old spinning wheel, which has long since 
gone the way of all the earth. 

Notwithstanding the appeal that the sentient and the obvious 



14 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

always made to me, I was ever an introspective child. Pain 
and death always loomed in terror before me. We lived in 
what is known as a sickly community. The disease called ma- 
laria made no exceptions in its ravages. It might be said that 
I was brought up on chills and fevers, pills, quinine and sassa- 
fras tea. Asafoetida, too, had its place in the pharmacopoeia 
of the day. It was an epoch of heavy medicine. The theory 
seemed to be to give the patient quantity enough to kill the 
disease. I thought I was a pretty strong boy when I was able 
to lift my father's saddle bags clear of the ground. I have 
seen him make pills on the back of a great dinner plate and 
then erect them into a gigantic pyramid that was sickeningly 
repulsive to the last degree. Frequently the directions were: 
Take one of these three times a day for thirty days. In these 
early years I had every disease except mumps and measles, 
which were reserved to vex my manhood and test my endur- 
ance after I became the father of a family. Shivering with 
ague and burning with fevers were the order of the day from 
early spring till late fall. 

A tragic and premature death came near being my portion 
from an accidental and too liberal dose of morphine when I 
was too young to remember my age. But the memory of the 
experience itself is as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. 
The medicine had been intended for my mother and by some 
irresponsible party had been given to me. The mistake was 
discovered in time for remedial means to be applied. For me 
that was a night of nights. By harsh treatment I was partially 
awakened. Then the long vigil and doubtful fight against death 
began. I was spanked, roughly shaken, flagellated, drenched 
with coflFee and emetics, rolled and stormed at, and when wake- 
fulness seemed to be attained, limp and stupid, I was carried 
in the arms of a half-uncle until far in the gray of the early 
morning. I shall never cease to be grateful to this relative 
for his unremitting toil in keeping alive the spark of life within 
me. The next morning when the damps of death were just de- 
parting from my brow, and the final weakness of physical ex- 
haustion sat upon me, I piteously asked this uncle why I had 
been so maltreated and had not been allowed sleep the night 
before. His answer was : "Had we not resorted to the heroic 
measures that were seemingly so cruel to you, you would be 



OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIENCES 15 

on your way to the graveyard now." For a quarter of a cen- 
tury I have used this illustration about myself to defend the 
persistency of earnest Christians who were troubling chloro- 
form sinners. 

I can never forget the first death I had the sorrow of wit- 
nessing. It was the demise of a grown young man, a third 
cousin of mine. I do not know how I came to be there since 
the place was two or three miles from our house, and I was, 
indeed, very small. How I went or returned is a blank to me. 
I found myself in the room of dissolution, chained by my first 
view of the agony of the age-long tragedy. The man was 
propped up on pillows and a grayish cast overspread his face. 
The ashen hue was around his lips. He was making inarticulate 
sounds and to me he seemed to be saying, "Mamma, Mamma." 
At the bed-railing sat his sweet, heart-broken and distracted 
mother, wringing her hands and helplessly wailing, "Oh, Bud- 
die, Buddie, Buddie." Not until the Son of Man shall come 
in glory and forever abolish death and wipe all tears from the 
eyes of weeping women, will that picture of unspeakable woe 
fade from my memory. 

Later the stepfather of that young man was killed by a fall- 
ing limb. I remember his bent form in the coffin. I have 
always hated coffins. I dislike the name and abhor the shape. 
Casket sounds better and it looks better. The pointed foot 
and head and the distended sides of the old-fashioned coffin 
filled me with terror. In the little village near us a first cousin 
of my father was the coffinmaker. I have seen him steam the 
sides and bend the planks and nail them to the ends. I have 
heard the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat of the small hammer as 
the outside cloth was nailed on and as the inner trimmings were 
placed. It was all gruesome to me in the extreme, and I used to 
often wonder if mortality could not be abolished. 

Be it remembered that in these parts religion was not very 
vital and the doctrine of the resurrection was not so forcefully 
preached as to offset the lugubrious thoughts that crowded in- 
fantile minds. I was the victim of all sorts of disquieting 
obsessions. Gypsy stories undid me. I had seen bands of these 
nomads passing on the road and had surreptitiously spied upon 
their camps. More than once did I dream that I was captured 
by the gypsies and carried far, far away. I was afflicted with 



16 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

what is known as nightmares, and in my paroxysm I thought 
the clouds were coming down upon me and were suffocating 
me. When discovered, I would be standing up in bed, trying to 
climb the walls in a futile effort to pierce the asphyxiating 
clouds and reach the pure air beyond. When awakened I 
would be in a tub of warm water by which means my father 
and mother were restoring my physical equilibrium and estab- 
lishing the balance of circulation. These doleful recitals are 
the true narratives of the inner feelings of a small boy who 
cannot forget. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS— MOVING 

Since it was predestined that my father would never get to 
Texas, but would spend his life and find his grave in Arkansas, 
he was seized with a mania for short moving. From the time 
I was eight years old until the time of his death, he was always 
on the jump. He had every personal excuse for his migrations, 
and he defended sacrificial surrender of his holdings with great 
fluency. He urged the matter of health for his family, cheaper 
lands, broader range for his stock and a thousand other 
specious arguments, justified his determination, answered the 
protests of his family, and overawed all opposition. Strangely 
enough each new move of the family carried us further from 
the centers of population, culture and power. The impression 
made upon the children was that they were to be hidden in the 
obscurity of the backwoods. 

At this time we moved eight miles farther south down to- 
ward the Louisiana line. The place-name of our objective was 
Troy. There was plenty of dignity in the name and the his- 
torical association sufficiently high-sounding to satisfy the anti- 
quarian and to please the modern. But four years of residence 
there did not reveal even a postoffice. There was an old two- 
story church and Masonic hall with an old field on one side of 
it and a graveyard on the other. The building was a general 
neighborhood utility structure. School, justice courts, singing 
classes and preaching were all conducted there. We lived on a 
little hill beyond this building and the justice of the peace, the 
quaintest character imaginable, resided across the road in front 
of us. The nervous proclivities of my father were shown in 
that he demolished the farmhouse the very first year and moved 
it Jown the road to another part of the estate. Here I came 
right up against the exactions of real life. Making a living was 
the important thing. My father was now an elderly man with 

17 



18 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

five small boys, and we had to wring a subsistence from the 
ground on a newly settled place in a remote community. 

Hard, imrelenting, and for the most part unremunerating 
toil was the portion of us all. Misfortune followed us at every 
turn. Some sneaking enemy stole the best horse from our stable 
and tied him out in the woods until starvation caused his death. 
My father rigged up a loaded shotgun and set it with both ham- 
mers cocked at the stable door, but that was after the horse was 
gone. To this day I marvel that some of us were not killed 
from the discharge of the gun set for the thief as we went out 
to feed in the early hours. 

I can never forget the unrelieved agony of continuous labor. 
Doubtless some work is good for children, but everlasting work 
is a measureless curse. We cleared land, cut sprouts, grubbed, 
hoed and plowed, and harvested early and late. This rigorous 
regime of unremitting toil was a weariness to the flesh. It 
stunted the body, dwarfed the mind, and embittered the soul. 
One year we made a crop with a blind pony and a yoke of oxen. 
During the rush part of the work season we had no meat. Every 
other day I walked two miles for some buttermilk and clabber, 
with which beverage we slaked our table thirst and washed 
down our frugal fare. That was the year that cotton seed 
products came into vogue as a cooking oil. The refining 
process had not been fully developed, and the odor from boiling 
cotton seed oil at the kitchen was not unlike the smell of rotting 
seed at the old-fashioned gin. By shutting your eyes and hold- 
ing your breath you could eat the potatoes and other vegetables 
cooked in this oil with a fair relish if you were very hungry. 

Many is the time that my hands have cramped to the hoe 
handle, and I had to rake them off on a stump in the field or 
against the protruding corners of a rail fence. Most of the 
land was rough and new ground. We plowed with a home- 
made plow stock, equipped with bull tongue and colter. When 
the colter cut a great root, both ends of the liberated under- 
ground runner did business against the unprotected legs of the 
barefoot plow-boy. There is to this day not a speck of skin 
on either one of my shins that was born there. When I now 
pass a country boy plowing in a field, my hand involuntarily 
goes to my side because the rough old plow-handle used to 
bruise and almost fracture my ribs. 



UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS 19 

Coming from the field dead tired after the sun had set, we 
ate what supper was awaiting us, then went to the back porch 
to wash our feet in the old-fashioned wooden foot-tub. The 
process of bathing was simple if mother was not watching. 
One foot was put in the cold water and gently rubbed with the 
other foot. Then the action was reversed. This over, we 
dragged our tired bodies to bed, where the night of rest was 
far too short for nature to restore the ravages of the preceding 
day's toil. The sogginess of a little body prodded to exhaustion 
and the effects of the toxic poison of overwork, prevented me 
from ever knowing the joys of normal slimiber. I never even 
knew the exact time when I went to bed. I was unconscious 
when I hit the couch and always the next thing was father's 
voice calling me to go and feed the horses. This call came at 
an uncomfortably early hour. It was the business of my 
brother next to me to arise at the same time and cut the day's 
supply of stove wood. The wood was chopped from dry and 
gnarled old fence rails. Since the axe was uniformly dull the 
year around, the wood-cutting operation was no small task for 
a sleepy, hungry lad hardly big enough to raise the axe above 
his head. During the four years we lived at Troy I experienced 
every imaginable country vicissitude. 

One winter and spring we had no variety of meat, but lived 
upon bread and pickled beef. The beef was cut into strips and 
put into barrels of boiled brine, where it kept well and would 
have been palatable enough had the diet not been so dreadfully 
monotonous. To this day the term pickled beef causes my 
stomach to revolt. This was also the era of cornbread. The 
move and the purchase of a new place had left the family for- 
tunes flat. It was cornbread for breakfast, for dinner and for 
supper. Often have I said that we only had biscuits on Sunday 
morning for breakfast, or when the preacher came, and even 
then the children were allowed but one apiece. Sometimes we 
had venison steak or squirrels. At these meals it was a great 
privilege to be allowed "to sop the frying pan." Here the 
crumbly bread absorbed the rich residue of the gravy left in the 
cooking vessel. Often a baked sweet potato was used instead 
of bread, and not infrequently there was a quarrel rising to 
blows between the two boys who were "sopping the skillet" 
because one quicker or hungrier than the other would shove 



20 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

his potato over the middle of the gravy line and thus impinge 
upon the rights of his brother. 

Up to this time my brother and I had never had a store- 
bought suit of clothes. Our winter outside wear was usually 
made by our mother out of gray jeans. This was a warm, serv- 
iceable cloth. The suit consisted of pants and jacket, both 
fitted as tightly as they well might. Next to the skin we wore a 
one-piece garment made of woolen linsey. That article of ap- 
parel to me was one long drawn-out torture. The prickly ends 
of the threads irritated my skin and aroused in me such an 
abhorrence for flannel or woolen underwear that from the day 
that I began to purchase my own clothes I have worn nothing 
but cotton. 

The shoes and boots sold us by the furnishing stores added 
greatly to our discomfort. The shoes were heavy, rough bro- 
gans, and the boots usually so drew on the foot that they had 
to be pulled off at night with a bootjack, and we never had 
any too many even of these. One pair to the person for the 
year was the rule. And perchance, if fortune favored, and the 
winters were long, there might be two pairs. Much has been 
written about the happiness and glory of the barefoot boy, but 
the poets and rhapsodists knew nothing of the terrors of cold 
and bleeding feet. For years I walked on the heel of one foot 
and on the toe of the other foot. Stone bruises, nailless toes, 
and lacerated foot bottoms were the concomitants of country 
conditions as they then were. 

Sometimes the larger boys of the family earned a little extra 
money by hiring out to the neighbors when up with the work at 
home. In the summer we would hoe corn or chop cotton at 
the wage of fifty cents a day, and in the fall pick cotton at the 
prevailing rate per hundred pounds. When picking cotton out, 
frequently I have left home so early that my breakfast was a 
cold baked sweet potato, eaten on the way to the cotton patch. 
In this way my brother and I earned our first manufactured coat 
and shirts. The two coats cost seven dollars, and the shirts, 
with detachable turned down collar, cost seventy-five cents 
each. The first Sunday we went to church in these new togs 
we circulated thru the crowd to see if any of the neighbors 
were so well dressed as we. We met behind the church before 
entering the house and with great satisfaction reported to each 



UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS 21 

other that we were by far the best-dressed boys on the ground. 

School facilities were pitifully meagre and the standards 
were close down to the ground. The term was in the heat of 
mid-summer and lasted from two to three months according 
to the funds. The instruction was in keeping with the equip- 
ment and that was the last Hmit of crudity. Teachers were 
not employed so much because of their ability to teach as of 
their pecuniary need. One time a good woman whose husband 
was not a very successful farmer was given the school and 
when another woman teacher was thought to be not quite sat- 
isfactory her husband was employed. Lest I be unjust, let me 
say that while living at Troy, we did have two teachers from a 
distance, a man and a woman, whose impress is still upon me. 
I register my gratitude to God for the devotion and piety of 
the good woman, a devout Episcopalian, who led us in the way 
of reverence and prayer. 

In this neighborhood I entered the riotous age and tumul- 
tuous period of youth. Thoughts were tumbling over each 
other in my head and my heart was burning for I know not 
what. I was making excursions thru books and papers out 
into the great world of learning and adventure. One day I 
would want to be a foreign missionary and the next a western 
cowboy or a mountain highwayman, so complex are the moods 
and so contradictory the convictions of adolescence. 

Then, too, I thought myself fearfully abused and woefully 
unappreciated. My parents and the neighbors seemed to wan- 
tonly underrate my abilities. It was hard to find anyone to 
whom I could talk and harder still would it have been for me 
to have adequately expressed myself. Occasionally I was the 
victim of the most depressing moroseness. Rebellious thoughts 
were bursting my little heart and in it all I was pathetically 
alone, for my companions were too stupid to fathom my mental 
distresses and my loved ones were too distraught with family 
cares to comfort or understand. A desire to know, to be, and 
to do was stirring within me and the religious impulse was 
struggling for expression and satisfaction. I did not know 
how to attain the first and there was no living soul to guide me 
in the development of the latter. There was at least one good 
preacher who came our way in these years. He was Rev. R. C. 
Stuart, who tho stricken in years, farmed for a living and 



22 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

preached as opportunity offered for the edification of the saints 
and the salvation of sinners. He was a mild, dear man whose 
very presence was a benediction and whose tones could soothe 
my turbulent spirit. 

That was a day and an environment which thought not 
seriously upon the worth of a child. He was too often cuffed, 
neglected, and toughened. Debasing associates and brutalizing 
companions left their ineffaceable marks upon all the boys of 
our neighborhood. The tragedy of it is unspeakable. Then 
there was no adequate offset to this tide of evil. The opposing 
forces of righteousness were not intelligently aggressive, 
neither were they zealous nor compactly organized. The grow- 
ing boys were sucked down in the whirlpool or they floated in 
the eddies or climbed up the slippery banks as best they could. 

At this time I was beset by every imaginable temptation and 
completely encircled by every form of sin. Despite it all the 
voice within me was never dumb and I was continuously grasp- 
ing for that that evaded me. It now seems that it would have 
been the easiest thing in the world for a devout spirit to have 
led me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake, but 
no pilot of the soul touched my life. A visiting preacher's hand, 
laid upon my head, would set aquivering every nerve in my 
being, and many is the time that I tremblingly expected the 
ministerial guest to speak to me intimate words of soul instruc- 
tion, but it was never done. I suffered on and groped my way. 
Oh, the pathos of the ignorance of grown people concerning 
the needs of a little child! And too often the consequences 
are tragic beyond repair. Kinsmen and hired men have times 
without number told me when I was a little miserable tow- 
headed boy that I was then having the happy time of my life. 
While I did not dare tell them so, I knew their words and 
theories were false and the long years have confirmed me in 
this opinion. 



CHAPTER V 
AMBITIONS AND EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 

Just as I passed my twelfth year we moved again. This 
time, however, we migrated back toward the center of the 
county within six miles of Monticello. Tho much nearer the 
county site than we had ever been before, the neighborhood was 
really the most backward community in which we had ever 
lived. The settlement was strung along Sand Creek between two 
public roads. Whatever of highway traffic there was did not 
touch us, and when we started to town or to church or to school 
we had to go about two miles before we struck the big road. 
Our location was such that by an effort we could reach the 
capital of the county in an hour or two, yet the cross-section 
position of the farm effectually isolated us. In this new place 
we first lived in a three-room log house, but there was a double 
hall and each room had a chimney, and as I recall living condi- 
tions were comfortable and exceedingly pleasant. About three 
years later we built a splendid, large boxed house on a rather 
favorable site, and this new residence with other farm improve- 
ments gave us a commanding position in the neighborhood. 
The land was good and the wood and water and range were 
abundant. The pride of our possession was a strip of bottom, 
lying on both sides of the creek that ran thru the field. We 
had in cultivation about twelve acres of this rich alluvial silt 
and whatever happened to the rest of the farm, there was 
always a satisfactory yield from the bottom field. 

I was now developing into a strong and vigorous boy- 
farmer. But I had ideas. Never for a moment since I could 
think had I contemplated tilling the soil as my life work. The 
periodicals that came to our table from the time I was born 
and the talk of my father and mother around the fireside had 
fired me with an ambition to transcend my birth conditions. 
Some of the papers that came to our home were Vickery's 
Fireside Visitor of Augusta, Maine, Home and Farm, Courier 
Journal, The Arkansas Gazette, and The Arkansas Baptist. 

23 



24 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

Later we got both Memphis and New Orleans papers. At 
Troy we were so far from a post office that mail was very 
irregular and its reception quite uncertain. For ten days or 
two weeks one fall my brother and I stood on the roadside, 
asking passers-by who had been elected president. Our papers 
had not come and there were no telephones, and even national 
election news had to be carried to us by word of mouth. 

While the country districts of our county were lamentably 
lacking in all the graces of culture, the town of Monticello had 
always been an educational center. There were noted teachers, 
intelligent doctors, acceptable preachers, and cultured women 
who created the spirit and molded the thought of the place. 
For years Monticello had the honor of being the home of the 
congressman at large, Col. W. F. Slemmons, who in his palmy 
days was said to be the handsomest man in the House of Rep- 
resentatives. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction 
did an enduring work, and laid the foundation work for his 
fame and fortune, in his own private school at Monticello 
before he was called to Little Rock to give the mature wisdom 
of many years to the work of developing the school system of 
the State. The names of all these outstanding ones were 
familiar to us from our earliest remembrances because of the 
insistent determination of our mother that some day her chil- 
dren would be placed under the tuition of these noted men. 

Our last move brought us nearer the seats of the mighty and 
that was sufficient compensation to the ardent boys for the 
labor involved in improving another place. By some means the 
country trustees in our district refused to allow the teacher to 
carry the pupils beyond what would now be called the sixth 
grade. I wanted to study Latin and Algebra. Fortunately we 
were blessed in having two teachers, one after the other, both 
of whom were highly educated elderly men. Our parents obvi- 
ated the difficulty imposed by the school authorities by boarding 
the teachers in return for extra tutoring in the higher branches 
given to my brother and me. This work was done at home 
before and after school hours. 

The upward struggle was difficult because the downward 
tug was hard. Money was scarce and the products of the farm 
were cheap. I think a little over eight cents per pound is the 
highest price we ever got for cotton. At times I was well nigh 



EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 25 

desperate as I thought I saw my youth sHpping away from me 
with nothing to show for it It seemed that the past had all 
been wasted and at times it looked as though every door of 
hope was shut in my face. My father was an irascible man 
fast growing old. He had brought up one family and the bur- 
den of a second brood in the evening of life was too much 
for him. Had my mother not been young and flamingly ambi- 
tious for her boys, sad indeed would have been our plight. 

There were three educational agencies that made rather 
large contributions to my mental development just at this period. 
These were the Bible readings conducted by my mother in the 
home, the political discussions in campaign years, and the em- 
bryonic debating society in the dimly lighted school house. A 
fourth factor, the annual revival meetings, might be credited 
with awakening spiritual impulses and arousing soul action. 
Permanent perennial Sunday Schools were unknown. Only a 
few months in the spring and summer could any neighborhood 
in which we ever lived maintain a Bible school at the church 
or school-house. Except for the social joys and the uplift of 
the congregation our home did not suffer serious deprivation 
because of the lack of the public teaching of the Bible. The 
Word of God was read and the helps were studied every Sun- 
day in my mother's room. The children as they grew old 
enough read verses by turn. It took much firmness on the 
part of my mother to force or cajole or persuade unruly boys 
to gather around her chair and read chapter after chapter of 
the Word of God, when field and wood and sunshine and play 
were calling. To this day the value of that Bible reading 
practice is manifest in every child that persisted in the exer- 
cise. Whatever mastery of pure English and whatever joys 
we find in the glorious writings of the Elizabethans are un- 
doubtedly attributable to the Sunday Bible reading drill in our 
country home. 

The political campaign was in that day a crusade of lofty 
ideals and great dignity. Even candidates for county offices 
were nearly always men of superior ability and culture far 
above the ordinary. The clash of mind on the stump and the 
display of forensic eloquence were intellectual marvels to the 
hungry-minded boys of the country side. The moral elevation 
of the speeches and the nobleness of the diction were infinitely 



26 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

above anything I have heard in the last decade. Men who 
could not speak did not attempt to speak. The candidates were 
largely gentlemen of the old southern school and there was a 
hint of knightliness of the past and in the voice of the orators 
was the haunting note of the fast vanishing race of men whose 
genius for statesmanship made their supremacy upon the forum 
unassailable. 

The high day of my political foregathering was when I heard 
in the courthouse the Congressional candidates. That is my 
red-letter experience. Our county had a candidate and there 
were three others. I remember them all and could now repeat 
large portions of the speeches. I walked out of that court- 
house determined to go to Congress. I got the map and laid 
out my district. I fell upon the law as my chosen profession, 
made some tentative plans with jurists to read law in their 
offices, secured an appointment from the county judge to the 
State University. I read feverishly every book about great 
men that I could lay my hands on. The newspapers were de- 
voured in a night by the light of a pine-knot fire. Every man 
prominent in public life of county, state, or nation was known 
to me thru the printed columns. The high tariff and low tariff 
advocates were familiars of mine. Frank Hurd of Ohio, 
Springer and Morrison of Illinois, Bynum and Voorhees of 
Indiana, Carlisle of Kentucky, Garland of Arkansas, Lamar 
of Mississippi, were the great democratic luminaries in whose 
light I walked and whose doctrines I accepted. On the other 
side was Blaine, the plumed knight of Maine, Hawley of Con- 
necticut, Sherman and Hoar, Conkling, Logan, and Blair of 
New Hampshire, who was eternally addressing the Senate on 
his education bill. Any day I would gladly have gone on my 
hands and knees any possible distance to see and hear a great 
man. One cold spring night I sat up till after eleven o'clock 
around the fire, listening to the informing and sparkling talk of 
a Pennsylvania tramp, whom I persuaded my father to take in 
for the night. This run-down bum discoursed volubly upon 
men, from Lincoln to Governor Curtin. So voracious was my 
appetite for public news that every chance visitor was called 
upon to pay a heavy tax for the hospitality extended him. 

The debating society was a crude, ill-conducted and poorly 
attended affair, but it furnished a few of us the opportunity we 



EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 27 

sought. The first question ever discussed was the relative 
merits of Washington and Columbus in defending and discov- 
ering America. I had the affirmative side and after listening 
to the stammering arguments, the judge very promptly ren- 
dered the decision in favor of my opponent. That was a 
crushing blow and the sting of the defeat is felt by me to this 
hour. The debating society's life was short, but it served its 
purpose and gave at least one of its participants a start upon 
his life's career. 

The protracted meetings of that time were probably more 
orderly as to the conduct of the crowds than they were a few 
years previously or have been since. The preaching was not 
of the highest order, but it was not bad. The sing-song in- 
toning minister was before my time. The preaching I heard 
was superlatively Biblical and earnest to the point of boiling 
blood. The seeking note was prominent in all the sermons and 
the prophet did not cease to warn his hearers day and night. 
The horizon of most of our ministers was not very broad, but 
their very narrowness made them mighty. Their concentrated 
convictions forged a terrible bolt which they launched against 
sin with deadly effect. I have seen whole audiences mightily 
swayed and entire platoons of strong men crowd the front 
benches and piteously cry for mercy. Sometimes the rough 
building would seem to rock as it was filled with the glory of 
God under the power of the preached word as proclaimed by a 
rugged and uncompromising son of the soil. The singing was 
old-fashioned, earnest, devotional, and weird. The music of 
the old hymns would break the heart of stone and start tears 
from every eye. 

The history of my own spiritual exercise and the story of 
my torn soul will be recorded in the chapter devoted to my con- 
version and call to the ministry. / 

Since there was no possible hope of advancement in the 
country school, I was now determined to leave the roof-tree for 
larger training. It was absolutely out of the question to expect 
my parents to pay board and tuition for me in town. The finan- 
cial condition of the family made the idea unthinkable and of 
course I had no money and there was no way for me to imme- 
diately earn a sum large enough to pay my expenses at school 
for a year. My father consented to release me from the farm 



28 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

labor and to allow me to go if the way should open. One of 
the teachers who had boarded with us, a scholarly old gentle- 
man, owned a house in town. He reserved one room for his 
own occupancy when he was not teaching in the country. This 
dear man, Prof. J. B. Hunter, offered to share his room with 
me and to instruct me without charge provided I would furnish 
the ampler portion of the staple foods we should need. It may 
be readily understood that I eagerly accepted this proposition. 
The cooking was done on the fireplace in the one room the 
teacher and lone pupil occupied. I brought from the farm 
bacon, salted pork shoulder, corn meal, butter, potatoes, and 
such other things as could be spared from the not too large 
store of provisions in my father's house. Mr. Hunter bought 
the tea and the sugar and whatever fancy groceries we used. 
The arrangement was not ideal, but it was the best thing in 
sight and I profited from the relation. 

I studied here for probably a half year and then I was able 
to secure and teach a country school. It was what was known 
as a "pay school." The tuition fee was a dollar a month per 
pupil. The community in which I taught was so remote that my 
loneliness was oppressive. My patronage was small and I 
did not make enough salary to pay my board. However, I 
learned in this distant section lessons of hardihood and self- 
reliance that have stood me in good stead throughout the years. 
As teacher I carried into the schoolroom ideas of discipline 
that I had gathered from those who had been over me. The 
rod was the supreme instrument of instruction. The commu- 
nity's conception of an efficient teacher was that he be able to 
thrash and subdue the big boys. I carried out this idea with 
terrible precision. My sternness was not so much because of 
innate hardness of heart and cruelty of disposition as because 
of fear. I was so small and so young that I was literally afraid 
of my pupils, and I thrashed them furiously to bluff them into 
submission lest they might discover their physical ability to 
overcome me. 

This drastic course brought me many pains and involved 
me in constant embroilments. Only the rarest diplomacy kept 
me from being brutally beaten by irate parents. I recall one 
exceedingly narrow escape. The enraged man was a sawmill 
hand, ignorant and truculent. His boy had come in for the 



EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 29 

usual chastisement. The father came to my room at night 
accompanied by a friend and urgently demanded that I take a 
walk down into a pine thicket where we could talk over the 
matter of the boy's punishment. I readily went to the desig- 
nated place. Ordinarily it would have been a foolish thing to 
do. A maturer man would not have dared accept that invita- 
tion. But it seems that my very crassness saved me. The 
bullying parent, who intended to maul me unmercifully, was 
evidently convinced that I was not afraid of him, and then my 
explanation of the affair of the child's punishment may have 
had some weight. At any rate I returned to the house alive 
and untouched, but I shudder in bodily fear now as I think of 
what might have happened to me out there in the dark. Surely, 
it was a horrible system that brought such suffering and hard- 
ships on both teachers and pupils. 

The next year was a happier time for me. My purposes 
crystallized and my opportunities broadened near home. In- 
stead of accepting the appointment to the State University, I 
went to Hineman University School at Monticello. This was 
a small training school for boys and girls, named for, founded, 
and conducted by Mr. J. H. Hineman, a graduate of Bingham 
School, and for these past thirty years prominent in educational 
circles in Arkansas. The school had the highest and most ex- 
acting standards. The work was one continuous drill and the 
preparation was the last word in thoroughness. The honor 
pupils took high rank in many colleges — and not a few have 
unrivalled preeminence in the learned professions and higher 
walks of life. Though a zealous Methodist, Mr. Hineman 
inspired and launched upon careers of preeminent usefulness 
many Baptist preachers. His fair method of instruction and 
his open and keen analysis of every subject no doubt had much 
to do with his school being a sort of nondenominational incu- 
bator for Baptist Colleges and Seminaries. 

For a little more than a year here I had what might be 
termed a gloriously hard time. I got both my tuition and board 
on credit. It took all the wages I earned at my next summer's 
school to pay these two bills. But, despite the practice of econ- 
omy, there were other expenses that had to be provided for. 
Books and clothes were prime necessities. I labored on Satur- 
days and afternoons. I worked on the streets of the city 



30 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

throwing gravel in the mudholes, and sometimes at a near-by 
brickyard. For a ten-hour day I received the wage of one 
dollar. That was considered good pay and I thought myself 
fortunate. For a while I was janitor of the public school build- 
ing. For this service I got five dollars a month. The contrast 
of the time is seen when I here write it down that I have not 
been able at all times since my affliction to keep a colored valet 
at ten dollars a week and board. 

During this term at my boarding place I was fortunate in 
the literature I found on the library table. I made acquaint- 
ance with such heavy magazines as The Forum and The Arena. 
These periodicals carried my citizenship from Arkansas to 
Boston. Since then the intellectual supremacy of "The Hub" 
has been to me a fascination and a delight unalloyed. 

The outstanding event of this school year was the lyceum 
lecture course inaugurated and successfully conducted by the 
principal. There were five numbers. The men were all spe- 
cialists in their lines and their impress is upon that town until 
this day. There was Col. Copeland, a star performer in his 
famous humorous skit, "Snobs and Snobbery." Then came 
CoL Sanford, the world traveler, who made our eyes bulge as 
he told us he had crossed the ocean nineteen times. Dr. Hedley 
brought us his "Love and Laughter." Dewitt Miller told us 
of California and the Golden West. But greatest of all was 
that prince of the platform, who yet lives in mellow old age, 
George R. Wendling of Philadelphia. God never made a man 
of handsomer stage presence nor gave to speaking mortal a 
sweeter voice. His every feature was noble, every thought 
was sublime and grace was in all his movements. In a southern 
town he naturally expected to be asked for his lecture on 
"Stonewall Jackson." So sure was he of this that upon arriving 
upon a belated train, he took from his satchel the address on 
the great southern soldier. But he was privately beseeched to 
give his marvelous sermon on "Immortality." There were 
local reasons for this. A strong sentiment of unbelief was 
dominant in the little town. One leading citizen and office- 
holder was an avowed agnostic. The doctrines of infidelity 
were boldly proclaimed and the danger to the educated young 
was imminent. Perilous to the souls were the times. I can 
Qever forget Mr. Wendling's opening sentence : "If a man die, 



EDUCATIONAL LIMITATIONS 31 

i.hall he live again ?" The rafters quivered with the fervor of 
his oratory. The walls reverberated with the grandeur of his 
periods. The gale thundered his anathemas against unbelief 
and the zephyrs softly wafted to broken and doubting hearts 
the deathless consolations of the blessed hope. After that lec- 
ture infidelity in Monticello was dead. Since that night the 
place has been a new town. Ministers and missionaries and 
serving Christian teachers have been the heavenly products of 
the hill-girt Capital of Drew County. 



CHAPTER VI 

NATURAL QUALIFICATIONS LACKING AND EN- 
DOWMENTS WANTING 

I am amazed at my own temerity in attempting to carve out 
a public career for myself. Never was there a sorrier specimen 
of boyhood out of which to make a leader. I was a tow-headed, 
tallow-faced, indifferent looking, undersized youngster. There 
was not a strikingly strong characteristic to my entire person- 
ality. I was painfully timid. In company my embarrassment 
was agony unconcealed. I suffered tortures in the presence of 
my betters. I constantly contrasted my own limitations with 
the more favored persons of my acquaintance. I had a hesi- 
tancy in speech that almost made me a stammerer, and when 
called upon even to talk in the family circle a dizziness would 
seize me and my words were flighty and contradictory. When 
I essayed public address, I was afflicted with nausea. My 
knees knocked and my whole frame trembled and the audience 
was a sea-rolling maze before me. The fairies put not a single 
oratorical gift into my cradle; neither by inheritance was I 
more favored. As far back as my lineage can be traced, there 
is no record of an effective public speaker. 

It was left for me to break the long years of forensic 
silence. The task was almost an insuperable one. I resorted to 
every conceivable stratagem to cure my defects. I read aloud 
by the hour; I taught my tongue the twist of words; and I 
practiced my voice in the roll of sentences. I traveled unfre- 
quented paths thru the woods that, unheard and unobserved, I 
might declaim in the presence of the forest. Between the 
plowhandles I sonorously thundered the masterpieces of the 
ancient worthies. Every stump and fallen log in the lonely 
field served as my pulpit or platform.. The barn was a favorite 
trying-out place for the witchery of advocacy, with the horse 
and cow as my dumb and unresponsive auditors. I marvel 
at the persistency of my efforts. To this day I suffer many of 

32 



NATURAL QUALIFICATIONS LACKING 33 

the same handicaps that made my youthful ebulHtions one con- 
tinuous torture. Never in my life have I gone into the pulpit 
unafraid. I have had to force myself to affect indifference as 
I trod the rostrum. Constant appearances did not allay the 
fear nor did ceaseless repetition cure the malady. Stage fright 
was my portion in the beginning and has been my bugbear to 
the end. 

Singularly enough I have succeeded in deceiving the public 
and even my most intimate friends have thought me gifted in 
the art of public discourse, especially that of extemporaneous 
address. The multitude jumps at conclusions and all too often 
goes upon the basis of contrast. I suppose most men are thus 
misjudged. I have suffered cruelly from the hastily formed 
opinions of many puritanical deacons and of numberless out- 
wardly pious Christians because I have laughed and quipped 
and joked. These I did to keep from crying. I smiled to hide 
my tears and laughed aloud to drown the uprising wails and 
I had the misfortune of being judged by the outward appear- 
ance rather than by the billowing sorrows that surged over 
my soul. 

I was of a mercurial, French temperament and my Latin 
blood caused me to hate the routine and monotony of work-a- 
day existence. The continuous task was intolerable to me. I 
had to lash myself to the oar, if I were to propel the galley. I 
forced myself to bend to the hardest labor and subjected my 
entire being to the most terrible discipline of life's common 
exactions that I might serve my generation with credit and 
meet the most repulsive duties with the fortitude of a man. 
Therefore I was always driving or being driven. Uncongenial 
duties met me at every turn. I think I can modestly say, tho 
I winced I never shirked. I had no talent for continuous, 
sustained toil; yet I goaded myself until I could perform the 
labor of a quarry slave. If possible, I was rnore wanting in 
ability to write than to speak. My penmanship was a scrawl of 
undecipherable hieroglyphics. It is no exaggeration to say 
that it was with great difficulty that I read my own writing when 
it became cold. I had not the patience to transfer my thoughts 
to paper and for years I was ashamed to send such execrable 
manuscripts as I produced to the printer. One blessing prob- 
ably will emerge — my family and friends will surely not be 



34 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

bothered with any barrels of my sermons. Not a dozen dim 
and musty outlines will I leave to clutter the library or to 
pester posterity. Not until typewriters became common and 
I could command the service of an amanuensis did I arrest the 
attention of the Christian public thru the denominational press. 

In all the spectacular elements that capture the minds of men 
and enthrall their hearts, I was sadly lacking. In fact, a critic 
when writing up a contest in which I was a participant said that 
there was not a line of the leader seaming my face. This thrust 
drove me to mental labor so intense that furrows were ploughed 
in my face and the hoar-frost sprinkled my hair. The perora- 
tion of Broadus in his matchless tribute to Gessner Harrison, 
"Fear God and Work," became my motto. Thus persistent toil 
in a measure offset temperamental and congenital delinquencies. 

My desultory and unsystematized habits of reading, and 
fugitive schemes of study did not fit me for the severe grind of 
organized high school and college discipline. I was not a well- 
rounded student. My shortcomings in mathematics were 
always painfully apparent. Discursive learning was my forte 
rather than the prescribed course. I was said to be good in 
Latin and I took the honors in English, History, and Rhetoric ; 
and in general reading I had no peer ; but from the standpoint 
of the schoolmen I was a baffling proposition. My brilliance in 
some studies gave the teachers good hope of developing me on 
all lines. But in this they were doomed to bitter disappoint- 
ment. I do not for a moment defend my course, nor do I hold 
myself up as a criterion for any other student. I deplore the 
lopsidedness of my education. There are many excuses that 
I might offer, but these are now beside the mark. I was in 
desperate haste to get out of school and into life; and I was 
always short of funds, and I thought that high rank in some 
branches would be a set-off to my low attainments in other 
lines. Undoubtedly this was a mistake and in consequence I 
have been handicapped thru the years. It humbles me to the 
dust to have to here set down shortcomings that I have never 
before confessed. I make the revelation lest other youths may 
be tempted to presume and follow in my own footsteps to their 
own undoing. I was unable to earn a degree and of course 
never received a diploma. My education might be termed as 
scrappy, disjointed and angular. The midnight toil of a quar- 



NATURAL QUALIFICATIONS LACKING 35 

ter of a century has in some measure atoned for the early 
errors, but the price I paid was a terrible one. I have tried 
to see that my children did not follow in my footsteps and I 
have founded a college to do the work for others that was never 
done for me. 



X 



CHAPTER VII 

AN ADDED CHAPTER ON PIGS, 'POSSUMS AND 

POTATOES 

Hitherto I have said little about the pastimes and pranks of 
my boyhood. In the preceding chapters the chronicle has been 
straightforward and the serious note has been dominant. The 
melancholy most poignantly affects the introspective child. 
Grim care grins over his shoulder and cuts the hard line of its 
history into his very being. Lest I should be charged with a 
pessimism to which I am a stranger both by nature and by 
grace, I purport here to record the lighter side of my boyhood's 
uneven pilgrimage. Certainly the usual variety of work and 
play, fun and frolic vouchsafed to the child of my day was not 
denied me. Hunting was the chief diversion of that time. Old- 
fashioned double-barrelled muzzle-loading shotguns and long, 
one-balled rifles were the weapons used. The powder was first 
put in the barrel of the shotgun and this was held down by paper 
wadding which was tightly pounded with a ramrod. On top 
of the wadding the shots were poured, then other paper was 
rammed down to hold the shots in place. Caps were placed on 
the tube and the gun was ready for action. There was a trunk 
full of old Confederate money on our place, all of which was 
used as gun wadding by my half-brothers and uncles. Many 
is the time I have wished some of that money had been saved 
as historic reminders of the lost cause. The loading of the 
rifle was very like unto the process of charging the shotgun, 
except that the lone ball was wrapped in a piece of tough cloth 
called a "patching" and then rammed down on the wadded 
powder. 

Squirrel hunting was the liveliest sport and also the best 
meat-producing excursion of the nimrods of my time. Very 
little boys were permitted to accompany the gun bearers to 
"turn the game." When a squirrel was treed he naturally 

36 



PIGS, TOSSUMS AND POTATOES 37 

placed a limb or the body of the tree between himself and the 
hunter. It was the business of the boy to go around and shake 
a bush that he might frighten the squirrel and drive him in 
range of the man with the gun. At the crack of the gun the 
body of the little animal would hit the ground with a sickening 
thud, where sometimes a battle royal would take place between 
the dog and the boy for possession of the dead squirrel. 

Coons were so prolific that often the green corn crop was 
endangered. I have seen their tracks by the tens of thousands 
on the moist ground along the banks of a creek. The coon was 
a wary varmint and when chased by dogs usually climbed the 
biggest tree he could find. It was the sport of stalwarts to cut 
the tree down and set the dogs to the task of killing the coon 
in fair fight. Coon skins covered the barns, chicken houses and 
the cabin doors of the backswoodsman. I have seen horses so 
laden with these dried pelts that you could scarcely distinguish 
the animal as it wended its way marketward with its cargo of 
coon skins. 

The trouble about the table fare of the farmer of that day 
was that it was either a feast or a famine. In the spring we 
had milk and butter, but in the winter we had none. As was 
often said, we had things in their season. We almost starved 
between beef and bacon. Hogs were of two varieties, wild 
razorbacks on the range and tame hogs at home. Nearly every 
farmer had hogs at home and also a "claim" among the wild 
hogs in the woods. These latter were always mast fed — that is, 
they lived upon whatever they could find until the acorns fell 
and then they were fattenend upon these. The flesh of mast 
fed hogs was not solid nor firm, and therefore did not keep 
very well. Often before cold weather, when in need of meat 
the farmer would with corn entice a fat razorback to some open 
spot, where the hog would be shot and then tethered by a short 
rope to the tail of horse or mule and dragged home for dressing 
and consumption. In addition to swine and cattle, my father 
usually had a small flock of roaming and depredating goats. 
In the lean days of summer we quite often had fresh kid, the 
flesh of which was esteemed a great delicacy by meat-hungry 
children. I remember that on two occasions we had bear meat. 
The flesh was very like bacon, though the grease was of a more 
oily consistency. White soft-shelled turtle made a dish fit for 



38 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

a king, and smoked rabbit was esteemed a delicacy good enough 
for a connoisseur. The rabbit was dressed and hung high up 
in the chimney above the old-fashioned fireplace, where it was 
thoroughly cooked and blackened. When wanted, the meat 
was stripped off and eaten. The negroes taught us this method 
of rabbit cooking. 

But the most wonderful sport for juveniles was 'possum 
catching. In the fall of the year, the old 'possum is fat and 
lazy. Any sort of a dog can run upon one in the weeds or 
chase him into a small sapling where he is easily captured. 
When caught, the 'possum affects death by "sulking." He can 
then be borne home with impunity. The usual boy scheme 
with a live 'possum was to stick his tail into the aperture of a 
green pole riven by the blade of an axe. That securely held 
the game as the ends of the pole were borne on the shoulders of 
two boys, one behind the other. The last and most successful 
'possum hunt I remember, we caught four; one so large and 
so vicious that he would never "sulk" ; he growled and snapped 
at us all the way to the house. Though a scavenger of the 
forest and the barn yard, when properly prepared opossum is 
the most toothsome dish ever set before a ravenous wayfarer. 
There is just one time to eat him, in the fall of the year after 
frost, when persimmons are ripe and potatoes are sweet. 

This furry varmint is killed by placing a piece of wood 
across the back of his neck, securely held down by the foot of 
the slayer, while with the hands the executioner pulls the victim 
over by the tail. This results in a broken neck and a quick and 
painless death. The hair is removed by rolling the body in a 
bed of steaming embers — that is, red hot coals and ashes upon 
which water has been poured. The result is a roll of clean, 
white flesh. Then the animal is eviscerated, laid open and 
placed inside out upon the housetop for the frost of a chilly 
night to fall in and freeze him. That takes away the 'possum 
odor and draws from the flesh the jungle funk. The next 
morning the carcass is taken down, placed in a large oven, 
lined with sliced sweet potatoes that will exude candy at the 
touch of fire, a slow-burning wood fire is kept going under the 
oven and on the lid for hours or until the escaping savory odor 
tells the experienced housewife that the dish is done. Words 
fail me now. Language is too poor to describe the ravishing 



PIGS, TOSSUMS AND POTATOES 39 

aroma and the toothsomeness of this incomparable culinary 
triumph. As Governor Taylor said of the old lady in the 
mountains of east Tennessee, "The best vegstubble that ever 
melted on these old gums of mine is kerpossum." 



CHAPTER VIII 
CONVERSION AND CALL TO THE MINISTRY 

I cannot remember when I did not fear God. I was ever 
awed by the mightiness of Jehovah and the terrors of the law 
consumed me. Tho fearfully depraved, I was always relig- 
iously inclined. From memory's dawn two principles con- 
tended within me for the mastery of my soul. The little 
prayers taught me by my mother were repeated with nightly 
regularity, the one beginning, *'Now I lay me down to sleep, 
I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep," was said until I gradu- 
ated into what is known as the Lord's prayer. Very early I 
made additions to these petitions. I did this because I felt the 
need of it. My spiritual history is not pleasant in retrospect, 
neither I fear will it make easy or acceptable reading. Never 
at any time was my soul's course smooth and even. Compan- 
ions, environment, unwise direction, all doubtless had their 
share in the anxieties and abnormalities that possessed me. 
Inward doubt and depression not infrequently obtained the 
mastery over me. I was never sure. The most splendid rhap- 
sodies were often succeeded by the darkest forebodings. My 
consciousness of sin was uncannily keen. I never had any sort 
of doubt about the fall of Adam and the fearful consequences 
of the curse pronounced upon our first parents and thru them 
upon all posterity. To me that doctrine was ever clear and its 
application to myself was incontrovertibly personal. That I 
was an outcast, utterly and justly lost, seemed a fact beyond 
debate. 

To me every favor of the Most High was unmerited grace. 
I walked around my fellows smiling, but thoroughly despising 
myself. And I was afraid ; afraid of God, afraid of death, and 
afraid of judgment. I thought myself the greatest of all sin- 
ners, and this too at a very tender age. I was obsessed with 
the idea of special judgments and bemoaned the afflictions that 
came upon my family, fearing that they were providential dis- 

40 



CALL TO THE MINISTRY 41 

pensations sent in punishment of my sins. I well remember 
going hom^e from school one day and finding my baby brother, 
of whom I was passionately fond, in the paroxysms of a con- 
gestive spasm. I was struck with the conviction that I was 
responsible for his condition and this distress drove me to the 
back of the house to pray. So it was with all the woes of the 
neighborhood. The deaths in the homes of our neighbors and 
the funerals at the neighboring cemetery all bore upon me with 
a weight crushingly heavy and pierced me thru with unreliev- 
able sorrows. Vicariously I suffered for all my little world. 
And there was heaped upon me the heartaches of my entire 
realm. The accusing finger of Deity seemed always pointed at 
me. I hated and shuddered at death and yet every death was 
my death. 

The consolations of the tenderer and dearer parts of the 
Bible had not been explained to me and their comforting as- 
surances were not stressed so as to relieve the dread blackness 
of my accumulated despair. The very terrors that clutched 
my heart drew me to the place of mourning. I would have 
given worlds to stay from the dead and from the cemetery, 
but my own heart agony drew me to both and I was probably 
the loneliest and most miserable soul that fearfully approached 
the death chamber and the graveyard. At every impending 
calamity I sought alone a place of prayer. This trysting place 
with God was usually the chimney corner at the farther end of 
the house. My prayer was characterized by intercessory 
pleading and piteous confession of personal unworthiness. I 
wonder now if this supermorbidity was an over-development 
of egoism or the result of too great emphasis upon the funda- 
mental doctrines of sin, or was it what it seemed to be, my 
predestined mission to be the vicarious sufferer for all I knew 
and of whom I heard. The souls as well as the bodies of my 
brothers seemed to be my special care. The moment one of 
them was taken sick, I had no peace and no rest until recovery 
was evident. 

When I was about fourteen my brother next to me was 
stricken with pneumonia of a most virulent type. The agony 
of those weeks is burned into me. I trembled on the threshold 
of his room, not daring to go in and look upon his suffering 
form ; yet I could not tear myself far enough away to be beyond 



42 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

the sound of his cries of pain. I did without sufficient food, 
and sleep fled from my eyes. To show my distracted condition, 
let me recite a wild tale of my church attendance one day at the 
crisis of my brother's illness. There was a Methodist quar- 
terly meeting going on a mile and a half from our house. In the 
hope of help and to escape from the heart depressing atmos- 
phere of the suffering home, I mounted my pony and hurried 
to church. But so anxious and distraught was I, that I left 
the service in its beginning and' went home at a lively pace. 
So distressing was the condition of my brother that I could 
not remain at the house, and I again mounted my horse, went 
back to the church, heard the conclusion of the sermon, and 
lingered to the close of the service. So quickened was my 
every faculty and so overwrought my nerves, that to this day I 
remember portions of the sermons of the two men, for there 
were two who preached, one following the other. 

Fortunately my brother recovered, and I had again a breath- 
ing spell from the stressful days thru which I had passed. 
But even these unusual soul experiences and heart tearing 
crises did not bring me immediately into the light. I could not 
see my way clear to make a public avowal of my faith in Jesus 
Christ as Savior and Lord. For me the way yet to the Cross 
was long and tortuous. I have an idea that I had been con- 
fused and misled by the experiences of older persons, and here 
is a psychological mistake of the first magnitude that was an 
error common to our fathers and the Christian workers of my 
day. All, children and grown people, were expected to be put 
in a common religious mold. It was thought that they must 
have the same convictions, the same experiences of grace, and 
the form of expression was to be identical. 

Then, too, I had planned my own conversion. I had an 
idea that it should be a cataclysmic affair after the type of Paul. 
I awaited the voice from heaven and the blinding flash of a 
startling presence out of the sky. These never came. They 
could not come, for God could never allow a sinner to dictate 
the manner of his conversion. My emergence from darkness 
to light was a process slow and painful. Full of qualms and 
beset by doubts, I groped and tremulously felt my way; and 
when on one eventful night I did go forward in the old country 
church to make a public profession of faith in my risen Lord, 



CALL TO THE MINISTRY 43 

it was not a moment of dazzling brightness with parting crowds 
and shouting hosannas, but a time of deep contrition, subdued 
self, and hopeful trust, accompanied by an inexpressible peace 
that suffused my quiet soul. I only knew that I had passed 
from death unto life because I loved the brethren. Thru sub- 
sequent life I have had to fight for my faith. A few weeks 
later a small company of people witnessed my baptism in the 
unpretentious waters of an eddying pool in a creek near the 
public road. That ordinance pictured forth my theology, my 
belief in the Lord's death and resurrection, my death to sin 
and resurrection to newness of life in Christ Jesus, and my 
hope that this body of my mortality shall rise again. 

The impression that I should preach was contemporaneous 
with the conviction that I should be a Christian. The two con- 
ceptions were allied and ran concurrently in my mind. But 
after my baptism I sought to delay entrance upon the ministry. 
I wanted to satisfy my early ambition to be a lawyer, achieve 
a reputation, accumulate a competency and go to Congress. I 
resorted to every mild device to postpone the hour of the great 
decision. I knew something of the hardships and unrewarded 
toils of preachers, and I felt more than the world can ever 
know my own utter unworthiness. This vacillating course 
gave every doubt a chance to do its perfect work. I fell upon 
trying times and, like Jonah, I tried to evade responsibility by 
fleeing the face of my Lord. I even went so far as to offer 
in compromise the evening of my life to the task of preaching 
if God would permit me to engage in secular employ in the 
strength of my manhood. It is needless ta say that this trifling 
with the greatest of all issues increased my difficulties and cov- 
ered me with confusion. My call was unequivocal and direct 
and the answer had to be a joyous acquiescence in the will of 
God or a flat refusal to obey His plainest command. 

The days of my controversy with Jehovah were for me full 
of pain and peril. Satan ably assisted me in every argument 
that I submitted for putting off the inevitable. My sins, my 
temperament, my age-long inheritance of Christian powers un- 
trained, all conspired to make me shrink from the high and holy 
calling of a messenger of God. The way to earthly prefer- 
ment seemed to be open, but the path to the pulpit looked long 
and rugged. Not to living mortal did I tell my trials or reveal 



44 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

the secrets of my heart, but all men seemed to know what was 
going on within me. I was astounded when fellow churchmen 
and pastor announced their belief that I would one day preach 
the gospel. It seemed that my fearful and beating heart had 
pounded out the news to listening ears. I had cringed and 
shrunk so long that I was beginning to feel myself a coward. 
I must have had the limp and furtive expression of a slacker. 
Why this indisposition on the part of a called man to obey his 
Master? — for thus has it ever been from Moses to the last 
preacher ordained. Only under the Divine compulsion will 
even a redeemed soul preach the unsearchable riches of grace. 
It was, "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel." The impulsion 
was unremittent, insistent, and clear. As a God-conquered 
man I could do no other, and the cry of glad surrender went up 
from my heart : "Lord, here am I, send me." 

I cannot therefore say that I was surprised when, on one 
hot Sunday afternoon our little country church held a called 
conference under the shade of some small trees by the side of 
a schoolhouse in which rustic singers were making music at 
the tops of their voices, and licensed me to preach. 



CHAPTER IX 
COLLEGE, FIRST SERMONS, ORDINATION 

When it was settled that I was to become a preacher, there 
was but one sort of educational institution suited to my needs 
— a Baptist college of unimpeachable denominational integrity 
and of unchallenged Christian character and teachings. Oua- 
chita College at Arkadelphia fulfilled these conditions and met 
all reasonable requirements. After correspondence with Presi- 
dent John W. Conger, I made the best and hastiest preparation 
I could to leave that fall for Arkadelphia. I had very little 
money, and some of that was borrowed, and my going-off outfit 
was pitifully meager. I had a trunk that cost four dollars, 
some books, a few pictures of loved ones and a scanty wardrobe. 

The trip from Monticello was an eventful one, made upon 
three lines of railroads. My brother, now commander in the 
navy, accompanied me. He was going to attend a Northern 
Methodist university in Little Rock, where he could work his 
way. We were driven the six miles to Monticello with cheap 
trunks in the farm wagon drawn by a stubborn mule and a 
balky colt. The home leaving was a trying ordeal. There was 
mother, a father rapidly aging and three little brothers to be 
left behind. Ever and anon the question whether we were 
doing right in leaving home at all would arise to disturb us in 
our quest of an education and in our dreams of triumph. The 
journey itself was an epoch in the lives of two green country 
boys. We traveled all day and spent the night in a hotel in 
Little Rock. 

There were some ludicrous sidelights to the trip. We ar- 
rived at Little Rock just as the electric lights came on in the 
evening. Never before had we seen spluttering arc lights 
illuminating a city, and in order to get the full benefit of this 
wonderful modern invention we walked up the middle of the 
street directly under the lights to our hotel. At our first meal 
in the hotel we were bewildered by the amazing number of 

45 



46 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

small dishes set before us, and at the table we held a whispered 
colloquy about the probable price of the meal if we should eat 
out of all the dishes. Next morning we were relieved to learn 
that there was no extra charge for the vast variety of foods 
served us. 

My brother found his institution and settled to study and 
to work, and I left on an early morning train for the college 
city on the banks of the Ouachita river. On arriving at the 
station in Arkadelphia, I was highly elated over my reception. 
The college president did not meet me, neither was the mayor 
at the train, but numbers of people of whom I had never heard 
seemed to know me and to be looking for me. These turned 
out to be cab men and boarding house proprietors. A nice 
young married student captured me and bore me away to his 
house. 

Unforgettable is my first morning in the college chapel. 
The student body was large enough and serious enough to be 
impressive, and as the faculty filed out upon the stage I was 
awed beyond powers of description at that human array of 
dignity and wisdom. The exercises were in keeping with the 
setting. Scripture reading by the president was almost dramatic 
in its thrilling impressiveness. The prayer was uplifting and 
the singing was tinglingly inspiring. The campus was a noble 
sight on the bluff of the river and the buildings were by far 
the most massive structures of the kind I had ever seen. The 
atmosphere of the school was unaffectedly Christian and the 
spirit of the institution was wholesomely democratic. There 
was learning without pedantry and piety without cant. To be 
sure, the standards were not then so high as they are now. 
The curriculum went from A, B, C to A.B. But the college 
nobly fulfilled its mission in the day in which its times were 
set. My reception was cordial and my presence was welcomed. 
Study was encouraged and demanded and discipline was main- 
tained and right conduct enforced. 

The college was thoroughly organized and the student soci- 
eties were factors of tremendous educational and social value. 
They had beautifully furnished rooms in which to meet, were 
well officered, glowing with enthusiasm and had back of them 
noble histories and achievements of which they were justly 
proud. I soon joined the Hermesian Literary Society and 



FIRST SERMONS AND ORDINATION 47 

later the J. P. Eagle Society of Religious Inquiry. The latter 
was for ministerial students only, while the former did not 
have a record of enrolling the best scholars nor the most sub- 
stantial class of men; it prided itself upon producing more 
poets, orators and medalists than its great rival, the Philoma- 
thian Society. 

I was soon to see my first great gathering of Baptists. The 
Baptist State Convention held its annual session in Arkadel- 
phia that year. Occasionally from our home county and church 
in the country some man would be a messenger to the state 
convention. He would bring back glowing accounts of the 
greatness of that body. And too I had read brief reports of 
these high convocations of former years in the state Baptist 
organ, and now I was to be in the midst of it all and really look 
upon the men of whom I had so often heard and around whose 
names imagination had cast a halo. In passing let me say that 
I saw and heard the giants and the princes of the church and 
behold I lived! 

One morning at the chapel there was subdued but unwonted 
excitement. The audience of students was bright- faced and 
expectant. The faculty was dressed with unusual care. Extra 
chairs were placed upon the stage. The convention digni- 
taries were our guests that day. Books were thrown aside and 
the eminent visitors were given the right of way. That picture 
is ineffaceably engraved upon memory's wall as I dictate these 
lines. There were personages upon the platform and they 
beamed upon us wisely and benignantly. There was Dr. J. 
William Jones, representing the Home Mission Board. (I had 
sold his book, the "Life of Jefferson Davis," packing it upon 
my back as I tramped afoot over the country side, and I had 
read his other book, "Christ in Lee's Army.") He was round, 
fat and sassy and more than forty. Though it was November, 
he wore low-quartered shoes over white socks. In a voice 
singularly feminine and fine he told his four splendid 
preacher boys whose little mother could manage them as if 
they were still children. 

Then there was Dr. W. P. Harvey, of the Western Re- 
corder, the most "pizen" Baptist of all. He trod the stage 
militant and belligerent. An Irishman, reared a Roman Cath- 
olic, he shamelessly revelled in his New Testament faith and 



48 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

Baptist liberty. He boomed out the word "Baptist" like a 
viking, defiant and unafraid. In the center of the stage sat a 
young man keen of eye and large of head. In a quarter of a 
century his name was to run through the corridors and class- 
rooms of the universities of the globe. A library of eighteen 
books was to be the labor of his hand and the output of his 
genius. He distributed a little pamphlet at the convention on 
preaching and scholarship. This was his professorial inaugural 
address. He was A. T. Robertson, the son-in-law and assistant 
of the great Broadus in the seminary at Louisville, and now 
the noblest Greek of them all. At the church that scholarly 
knight of the republic of letters, W. R. L. Smith, pastor First 
Church, Nashville, represented the new Sunday school board 
that was petitioning for favor and seeking to serve. For the 
purest English extant, just read Dr. Smith's address on "Jeter, 
Fuller, Yates." Our literature is infinitely poorer because of 
the shrinking modesty of this marvelously gifted man. The 
tall and saintly Dr. T. P. Bell spoke for the Foreign Board and 
presented the claims for world-wide missions. This pious sec- 
retary and editor, after a life of noble service, a little while 
ago put off his harness and entered into the joys of his Lord. 
Governor James P. Eagle was president of the convention, and 
a mighty host of invincible warriors and scarred veterans of a 
thousand battles for the Cross led in the deliberations of the 
body. Their grizzled visages loom before me now, and their 
quenchless zeal and uncompromising convictions of truth are 
an inspiration to me unto this day. Most of these have long 
since joined the choir invisible, but their works do follow them. 
The seraphic and zeal-torn B. G. Maynard was the state secre- 
tary of Arkansas. Eternity alone will reveal the worth of this 
foundation layer's sojourn in Arkansas. A few years ago he 
went on high from his Missouri home. 

These are the impressions of my first convention and its 
loftiness and glory shall not depart from me until all are 
merged in the convocation of the saints in the supernal splen- 
dors of the general assembly of the First Born. 

There were few opportunities for the young theological 
aspirants to practice preaching in or around Arkadelphia. For 
some reason the churches and communities were rather inhos- 
pitable to youthful ecclesiastical invasion. The position of a 



FIRST SERMONS AND ORDINATION 49 

ministerial student at college is rather trying. It is expected of 
him that along with favorable progress in his studies whatever 
be his stage of learning, that he be pious, a leader in the re- 
ligious activities of college and local church, and with all be- 
comingly submissive. He is somehow expected to do enough 
preaching to learn the art. There is no provision made for 
him to have any systematic training in pulpit or pastorate. But 
he is expected upon his own initiative to find appointments and 
fill them, to gather congregations and preach to them. He is 
expected to learn denominational procedure while remaining 
inconspicuously in the background. I offer no solution of the 
problem and I make no complaint, but I am simply stating the 
difficulties. The theological seminary student has a better 
chance and a more established standing than the mere college 
ministerial student. After all, however, it is probably a good 
thing for the neophyte to be temporarily suppressed and kept 
in his place. One of my schoolmates had a monthly appoint- 
ment at a new pine schoolhouse some three or four miles out 
from town. I persuaded him to allow me to accompany him 
on one hot Sunday afternoon. We walked the entire distance 
there and back in the heat and dust. My friend graciously per- 
mitted me to address the audience for a few minutes. This 
concession was indeed a favor for it was precious time taken 
from the hour of the regular preacher. As we returned, the 
only comment made by my brother upon my effort was, "Tardy, 
why do you make such an ugly face when you arise to speak ?" 
When the Christmas vacation came, I was out of money and 
of everything else that I needed to keep me in college. I went 
back to my home and did not return to the late winter and 
spring session. On the farm I tried to fit again into my old 
place as laborer and helper, but I was restive and anxious to 
preach. There could not possibly be any remunerative minis- 
terial work awaiting me, for no man so young as I had ever 
been paid for preaching in all that section of country. Finally 
the pastor of the Baptist church in Monticello extended me an 
invitation to preach my first sermon in his pulpit. For some 
reason the pastor, the famous blind preacher, Dr. White, was 
to be absent on the day I was to appear. This was one source 
of embarrassment removed, for which I was devoutly thankful. 
I tried to prepare my sermon and my heart for the ordeal. I 



50 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

was anxious, too, that the service should receive as little ad- 
vertisement as possible. The fewer the hearers I had, the 
better I should like it. I never can forget that morning. I had 
made a few notes on the text, "Be ye not conformed to this 
world." These I carried into the pulpit. I was chagrined to 
see my old school principal file into the building, followed by 
cultured associates and not a few of my former iellow pupils. 
They came from the most innocent motives and out of the 
tenderest regard for me, but their presence made the cold 
chills race over me. I had to conduct the entire service, in 
addition to the task of trying to deliver my maiden sermon. In 
prayer my voice sounded hollow, and afar off. I found that 
talking to God on behalf of the people in public worship, was a 
holy and awesome thing. It was a heart-searching and soul- 
straining experience and it left me emptied, humbled, and dumb 
with amazement at my own audacity. 

I hurried thru the hynms and struck furiously for the 
sermon. In the attempt to preach the sound of my own voice 
again frightened me. My notes got mixed before my dancing 
eyes, the audience swam before me, and floor and ceiling seemed 
to meet. The only redeeming feature was the brevity of my 
address. Probably in twelve minutes I had finished. It seemed 
that I had been trembling behind that pulpit for an age. I 
could have wished that the floor had opened and swallowed me. 
I should have rushed in the darkest cave had there been one 
near-by, to hide my shame and confusion. I was convinced 
that the effort was a dismal failure. I remember hoping that 
my friends and the people would all go out without speaking to 
me, for I was sure they could truthfully say nothing good of 
that service. To my surprise and overwhelming humiliation 
Professor Hineman, whose critical opinion I dreaded above that 
of all men, took me by the hand and said : "William, that was a 
very edifying discourse." That is the only comment that lingers 
with me, but it was enough and it has heartened me to try again 
after many failures. I preached only four more times in my 
native county, once at the church where I was converted and 
once at Collins near where I was born, and one time each at 
two other country churches. 

In a few months my father made his last and longest intra- 
state move. This time he went twelve or fifteen miles west of 



FIRST SERMONS AND ORDINATION 51 

Pine Bluff, beyond the fringe of civilization and into the very 
heart of the wild. He had for many years owned some woods 
land in that locality and after selling his Drew County farm he 
purchased a partially improved place near his other holdings on 
the lines of Jefferson and Grant Counties. This was a disas- 
trous financial transaction for my father, but in many ways the 
Lord made the move redound in blessings to the children. Not 
being able to go back to college, I again dropped into my old 
place at the farm and was subject to my parents. In those 
remote and weirdly rural surroundings I made the best of my 
father's bad bargain and bent every energy of my being to 
assist in mending the family fortunes. I preached to the 
strangely ignorant folk and both my mother and I taught school 
in those far off jungles. 

There came at length one summer a providential opening 
of preeminent significance to me. I learned that the new 
pastor, Rev. W. K. Penrod, of the First Baptist Church, Pine 
Bluff, was to preach one Sunday afternoon at White Sulphur 
Springs, a resort seven miles from the city and more than that 
distance from where we lived. I determined not to lose the 
opportunity of hearing this town preacher whose fame had 
reached the country side. Therefore I made it a point to 
attend the service at the Springs. The sermon was on the 
faith of Abraham. All of the events of that afternoon are 
yet fresh in my memory. I met Dr. Penrod and he invited me 
to visit him in Pine Bluff and to preach in his church. Later 
that noble pastor led his splendid congregation in sending me 
back to college. The finest tailored suit of clothes that I ever 
owned was given to me by friends that I here made. I placed 
my membership in that outstanding church, and the results 
amply justified the relationship. 

A year or two later that sovereign congregation called for 
my ordination and on a rainy Sunday morning before a filled 
house, the pastor preached my ordination sermon from the text, 
"Let no man despise thy youth." The presbytery was com- 
posed of the elders of the church and the deacons, and Dr. W. A. 
Clark, editor of the Arkansas Baptist, who presented the Bible 
at the conclusion of the public oral examination. Mr. John T. 
Marsh, a great churchman and a leading business man of the 
city, arose and made the following motion : "Brother Moder- 



52 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

ator, I move you, sir, that the church instruct the presbytery to 
proceed with the ordination of our young brother by the laying 
on of our hands." I bent the knee and bowed my head, while 
the hands of those good men were caressingly laid upon me. 
That was the supreme moment of my youth. It marked the 
official sanction of my dreams and the ecclesiastical recognition 
of the inner urge. So far as a church could do it, I was now 
set apart to the full work of the gospel ministry. Ever after- 
wards I had an open road. The zeal, confidence, and approba- 
tion of that prominent church gave a momentum to my upward 
climb and an impetus to my preaching crusade that the oppo- 
sitions of a quarter of a century have not been able to check. 
I cannot close this chapter without a further word regarding 
the life and character of my beloved friend and pastor. Rev. 
W. K. Penrod. He was a Kentuckian who early moved to 
central Texas. In Ellis County he heard the call to preach and 
got his training under the great masters at the Seminary at 
Louisville. After a notably successful pastorate at Pine Bluff, 
he wrought heroically at the First Church, Paducah, Kentucky. 
Then for years he was the solidly upbuilding leader of the 
Tabernacle Church at Ennis, Texas. Later he happily min- 
istered to the First Church at Cleburne for a long pastoral 
tenure. And now in the mellowed glory of life's soft evening, 
he is preaching to the saints at Gonzales and leading many to 
righteousness, while he patiently waits until the Master comes, 
the hem of whose garment he shall touch and be forever young. 



CHAPTER X 
PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 

After my ordination a great door and effectual opened unto 
me. Invitations poured upon me and the bars were down 
everywhere. Even before this I had been preaching once a 
month at Alexander, a little town more than fifty miles from 
Arkadelphia on the Iron Mountain towards Little Rock. For 
each monthly visit I received a stipend of five dollars. Often 
have I said that not since have I ever had so much money to 
spend for the smaller things of life. My visits to Alexander 
were a joy and my associations there with the small company of 
people a delight. As I remember, the church had sixteen mem- 
bers who worshiped in a rather pretty little building in which, 
I should think, I preached to from thirty to fifty people. Here 
I had one convert for baptism, but I was called to another field 
before I could administer the ordinance. 

In the summer of my second year at college, by virtue of 
the recommendations of Dr. Penrod and other influential 
friends, I was invited to assume the pastorate of the Baptist 
church at Camden, Arkansas, while still continuing my studies. 
This was the most surprisingly acceptable honor that ever 
came to me. Camden was an old town long since fully grown, 
of no inconsiderable wealth and culture. The membership of 
the Baptist church was the superbest organization of redeemed 
wayfarers I have ever known. There were only about sixty- 
five communicants, but they were the salt of the earth and the 
elect of the Lord. Worldly prosperity was just beginning to 
smile upon some of the leaders. The Civil War aftermath had 
not yet been lived through and as in most ancient towns of 
the haughtier sort. Baptists were a financially feeble folk, often 
secretly despised and not infrequently openly contemned. But 
the piety and character of this congregation commanded the 
admiration and respect of all the right-thinking people of the 
community. Scions of illustrious families were on the church 

53 



54 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

rolls. The Lides of South Carolina, the Watts of Alabama, and 
the Lees of Virginia and Mississippi, and the Rowlands were 
some of the foremost families who bore the burdens and gave 
standing to the little church. 

The building, a huge two-story brick, though in a strategic 
location, was a veritable handicap and an estoppel of growth. 
The lower floor was owned by the church and the upper story 
by the Masonic lodge. This double proprietorship and dual 
occupancy militated most seriously against the church. How- 
ever, there was no friction between the two bodies, but on the 
contrary each showed to the other the profoundest considera- 
tion. For twenty years this condition has been changed. The 
church owns the entire property and worships in a beautiful 
modern edifice fully adapted to all the needs of Kingdom 
building. 

In this pastorate I received what was then regarded a mu- 
nificent salary. The figures were six hundred dollars a year. 
And I had nothing to do but preach on Sundays. I came from 
college on Saturday and returned on Monday. My permanent 
residence in Camden was in the lovely and spacious home of 
Mr. and Mrs. M. P. Watts. For a year and a half I dwelt 
under the roof-tree of this incomparable couple in great com- 
fort and affluence — and all without charge. Mr. Watts has 
become one of the opulent merchants and great churchmen of 
Arkansas. In some respects Mrs. Watts was the brightest 
woman I have ever known. Their care for me was singularly 
sweet and tender and away and beyond any claims I had upon 
them and infinitely far above my deserts. I most humbly 
record my deepest gratitude to these dear people for pouring 
their rich lives into the very being of one so little deserving 
their love and hospitality. In my third year at college I won 
for Ouachita the Intercollegiate State Oratorical Medal. This 
was the first time the trophy had ever been captured by a rep- 
resentative of our Institution. I tried with becoming modesty 
to use the prestige of this high honor to advance the Kingdom 
of my Lord and Master. Following my success in the State 
Oratorical Contest, came an invitation to deliver the Commence- 
ment address at my old high school at Monticello. In some 
respects this was the proudest moment of my life, for here 
the insuperable trials of impecunious youth flowered in the 



PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 55 

victories of triumphant manhood in the arena of former 
defeats. 

My face was now turned toward Texas. This was but the 
logic of birth and parental influence. The first creeping of all 
my mother's children must have been toward the west. All 
came to the Lone Star State so soon as they were old enough. 
There is not one of my name in Arkansas except those who are 
under the sod. The church at Jefferson, Texas, issued me an 
invitation to visit them with a view to a call. I went to that 
historic old town whose commercial supremacy had long since 
vanished, and preached in the building that had in the seventies 
housed the Southern Baptist Convention and where the emi- 
nent W. W. Landrum had been ordained. Though the call 
was extended me, I declined and accepted instead the church 
at Longview, both because the latter city was farther out in 
Texas, a throbbing young town, and because the church was 
ambitious and aggressive. 

On the Monday of my return from Jeiferson to Arkansas 
I was caught in one of the most terrific railroad wrecks of the 
century. The two fast North and South Cannon Ball trains 
collided head on at full speed on a curve a few miles north of 
Queen City. The impact of the smashing engines as they 
thundered into each other derailed and wrecked car after car. 
I believe seven were killed and many times that number were 
injured. In a wondrously mysterious and a peculiarly gracious 
manner the Lord preserved me from all physical harm. On 
boarding the train at Jeiferson I carried my luggage into the 
chair car, the coach I invariably occupied when traveling. 
Though there were numbers of vacant seats, I walked imde- 
cidedly down the aisle into the first puUman, through this into 
the second puUman, not stopping until I stretched myself out 
to rest on the lounge in the smoking compartment at the rear 
of the second pullman. I was lying here when the crash came. 
The horrors of the wreckage, the frightened screams of the 
hurt, and the ghastly faces and moans of the dying benumbed 
me into a rigid calm. The terrible reaction came some days 
later. In my sleep the maddening crash of destructively tele- 
scoping trains and the piteous horrors of dying men and wailing 
women would come upon me with painful vividness and shock 
me with unbelievable severity. Whatever the critics and seep- 



56 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

tics may say, I shall hold to my original conviction that the 
Lord saved me by his own special providence and protected me 
by the might of his outstretched arm. 

In September, 1894, I entered upon the duties of a delight- 
ful and prosperous pastorate at Longview. The youthfulness 
of the church and congregation and the western self-assertive- 
ness of a growing town, caused them to follow my leadership 
with a devotion and spontaneity rarely beautiful and nobly in- 
spiring. In October I attended the Baptist General Conven- 
tion of Texas, which met in the First Church at Marshall. This 
session was notable for precipitating the great State-wide Bap- 
tist war, originating in individual ambitions and personal feuds 
which for so many years wrought untold harm to vital religion 
and denominational integrity, and the final effects of which are 
just now being forever effaced in the growing fraternity and 
sweeeter fellowship of a better day. The atmosphere was not 
good for young pastors and plastic boys. I must confess that 
for two years I was on the wrong side in the great controversy. 
I might plead my immaturity, my environment, and my ad- 
visors, but my brethren forgave my defection with unaffected 
graciousness and for more than twenty years have with open 
arms welcomed me to their inner councils. But this is a digres- 
sion. It is not my purpose to write the history of Texas 
Baptists, but my own life. 

At Longview I found my wife and here our first child was 
born. In the spring 1895 my first hard sorrow came in the sud- 
den death of my father on his little farm in Arkansas. Since the 
hour the yellow slip, telling me the awful news, was placed in 
my hands, I have been afraid of telegrams. With my bride a 
sad journey was made back to my native State, where in a 
woodland cemetery the body of my dear parent was put among 
the graves of strangers on a spot unmarked to this day. The 
heart-rending pathos of the funeral was that I had to read the 
scripture at my own father's burial. 

It took all the property possessed by my father to liquidate 
his debts and to give his body the plainest interment. Every- 
thing went under the hammer ; houses, lands, live-stocks, and 
chattels and movables of all descriptions. I think my mother 
had some pillows, three or four featherbeds, and some fairly 
comfortable wearing apparel for the family left. The family 



PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 57 

consisted of three brothers, my mother, and her orphan niece. 
They all came to live with me and my young wife in the parson- 
age at Longview. Thus in less than three months after I 
married, I was the head and only visible support of a family of 
seven. The filial duty was imperative, however backbreaking 
the burden for one so young and so poor as I. It took nearly 
two-thirds of a month's salary for me to pay the railroad fare 
of my loved ones to my home. 

I know now that I sinned grievously in my ignorance, my 
pride, and my boundless ambition for the progress of my trans- 
planted relatives. Often I was too exacting with my poor 
little country brothers, but I meant them good with all my 
heart, and I loved them with a passionate devotion. But this 
relation of two families in one small pastor's home could not 
last and a few weeks before our first baby was born my mother 
set up housekeeping on a modest scale in a rented house, where 
she taught a private school and somehow kept the wolf from 
the door. 

After not quite two years' service at Longview, I entered 
upon the pastorate of the First Baptist Church at Palestine. 
The prime cause of my move was that I was afflicted with the 
mania for what was then called "a larger field." Palestine was 
larger than Longview, but the church was not so wealthy nor 
so commanding as the one I left. The building was what was 
known as "The Nickel Church." It was erected thru the 
genius and tireless energies of Major W. E. Penn, the famous 
evangelist. Money was gathered from all parts of the globe 
for this enterprise. The first story was built from nickel con- 
tributions, therefore the name. But in order to complete the 
building, subscription standards had to be raised and larger 
contributions were invited and accepted. For many years this 
was the most commanding church building in the city, on a 
location that showed rare wisdom and foresight. The congre- 
gation had been gathered by evangelists from the four winds 
and in consequence the church never had been a substantial, 
aggressive, and dependable fraternity. Pastors came and went 
with comic and alarming frequency. The audiences were uni- 
formly large, but their consistency was nebulous. This does 
not mean that there were not many very fine people in the 
church, nor does it mean that a great deal of Kingdom work 



58 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

of the highest value was not done. It only means that the 
conditions were not ideal. 

The parsonage was an old sprawling brick building far up 
the rambling red hills beyond the church. It was a blue day 
for my lovely wife when I carried her and our round young 
baby to that desolate abode. With the furniture that we had it 
was simply impossible to make that grotesque piece of archi- 
tecture look like anything on the inside. In time, however, we 
learned to love the old place and to appreciate the comforts of 
the thick walls and friendly roof. New acquaintances ripened 
into friends and my brief but intensive ministry was in some 
respects phenomenally successful. Crowds waited upon the 
Word, scores were converted and baptized, and my machine 
gun attacks upon popular vices made the indifferent and wicked 
old town acknowledge my presence and rise in antagonistic 
answer to my assaults. There were many puissant souls who 
supported me with a courage and devotion beyond praise. Some 
of these have crossed the River and some are crossing now, 
while others are yet left to carry the heavier loads of the newer 
and weightier responsibilities. 

The remarkable conversion of an aged paralyzed man is 
one of the outstanding features of my Palestine ministry. The 
old gentleman had to be brought into the church on the strong 
and friendly arms of men who were interested in his soul. 
Three times only did he come. The first sermon he heard, 
under the second appeal he surrendered, and at his third attend- 
ance he was baptized. My information is that the happily 
converted old man was never able to enter the church after the 
night of his baptism. Soon after this turning point in his long 
career of sin and doubt, death swept him into the presence of 
his gloriously reconciled Father. Brother A. M. Glenn, a man 
of gigantic physical proportions, but with the heart of a little 
child, will wear in his crown the fadeless star of God's high 
reward for leading this decrepit and shrinking old man to the 
foot of the Cross. 

After an absence of twenty-one years I returned not long 
ago to give my war lectures in the beautiful audience room of 
the new church at Palestine. My reception was an ovation. 
Governor Campbell introduced me and friends of the elder 
days joined the younger throngs in plaudits that almost broke 



PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 59 

my heart with joy unspeakable. With a pensive wistfulness I 
sought the haunts of the past and in my invalid chair I was 
rolled by the old church and the old parsonage. A grocery 
store was doing a thriving business in the temple where I had 
so often preached. I suppose there was nothing wrong in it, 
but I must confess that there was a mist in my eyes, a choke in 
my throat, and a tug at my heart when I saw bales of hay, 
sacks of flour, and cans of coffee and lard in the vestibule of 
the sacred old house where the feet of the saints had so often 
trod. The parsonage was the same. I rolled round its squatty 
walls and thought of the times without number I had left my 
lonely wife and baby there unprotected, as I went out to visit 
or preach, and the sensitive soul of a mature man reproached 
me for my thoughtlessness and neglect. I remember, too, the 
desperate illness that came so near snatching from us our first- 
born in the morning of his babyhood, and I saw the very spot 
upon which the little fellow stood when he first cried for me not 
to leave him. That appealing wail of the baby awakened to 
love, thrilled me with a fatherly pride that has sweetened all 
the years of parental toil and anxiety. 

After a ministry of fourteen months in Palestine I removed 
to Paris. Here I went to what was known as the orthodox wing 
of the disrupted First Baptist Church. The character of the call 
decided me. I had never visited Paris and the congregation 
there had never seen or heard me. The first intimation I had 
that I was under consideration for the pastorate was a tele- 
graphic notification that the call had been extended. My an- 
swer was a quick and emphatic acceptance. I thought then the 
manner employed in filling that pulpit was the acme of wis- 
dom and the epitome of directing grace. I am not so sure of 
all of this now. Probably there should be a little deliberation 
and investigation, and surely the preacher should give longer 
consideration in answering than I did in this instance. Look- 
ing back from the long distance of two decades I feel, however, 
no regrets and had I to do it over, with ample time for contem- 
plation, the course of action should be the same. 

Paris is the loveliest and most beautiful little city in which 
we have ever lived. There was a bitter legal battle for the 
possession of the handsome common church property. My 
faction won in the District and Appellate . Courts, but lost 



60 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

finally in the Court of Last Resort. This was as it should be, 
and the results should teach Baptists to settle their own troubles 
among themselves without calling up Caesar to intervene. I 
never saw the inside of the beautiful First Church building 
while I lived in Paris. Our worship was conducted in three 
places, a public school building, an improvised tabernacle and 
Myer's Auditorium. The latter, the permanent church home. 
Unusual outward success crowned my labors here. A large and 
regular audience was gathered, conversions were frequent and 
a spirit of generous responsiveness was developed in the people. 
The old time truths were stressed, and the emphasis I was 
forced to place upon the eternal verities and gospel fundamen- 
tals greatly clarified the religious atmosphere and mightily estab- 
lished the faith of true believers of every name throughout the 
entire city. When I had carried the church as far as I thought 
I could, I handed in my irrevocable resignation and left with- 
out any favorable outlook for an immediate settlement in an- 
other pastorate. Despite the strained relation between the 
two wings of the church and the long drawn out legal con- 
test I look back upon my Paris ministry and view it in the whole 
as a labor of delight and a joy continuous. In that city I had 
the privilege inexpressible of baptizing my youngest brother, 
and there our second child, now a lieutenant in the army, was 
born. 

In May, 19 18, I made my first and only return visit to Paris 
since the day I left twenty years before. The occasion was one 
of unexampled auspiciousness. I preached in the morning and 
at night I lectured in the great Greek temple called the meeting 
house of the First Baptist Church. This is a building of sur- 
passing beauty and a pile of noble dignity. Over a thousand 
people crowded the classic upper audience room to hear my 
lecture in the evening. Many to whom I had formerly preached 
had embarked for the shore and were already seeing their 
Pilot "face to face," while others whose love is deathless 
warmly grasped my twisted hands and heard me with an inter- 
est that arrested the flow of my fast ebbing life. Rev. W. B. 
Kendall has been the peerless leader here for twelve years, and 
to his vision and indomitable preseverance, heartily seconded 
by an innumerable company of earth's saintliest souls and in- 
spired by the unfailing charm of Mrs. Kendall, an incomparable 



PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 61 

pastor's companion, is this architectural poem in brick and stone 
attributable. I shall be pardoned for calling the name of an- 
other : Mrs. Captain D. S. Hammond, the Dorcas and Priscilla 
of the church, yet abides in sanctified serenity and holy labors. 

My next pastorate was the First Church at Greenville. 
There was an interval of some two months between my Paris 
and Greenville pastorates. The call to the latter place had like 
that of the former come to me without my knowledge or solicita- 
tion. The news of my election was conveyed to me over the 
long distance telephone. My only visit to Greneville had been 
some two or three years before to preach the Commencement 
Sermon for Burleson College. 

I moved to the city of the blackland prairies in the dead of 
the dreadfullest winter I have ever known. I slushed in the 
sable mud of the streets as I staggered in the clutches of the 
most remorseless attack of the grippe that ever laid siege to 
my vitals. 

It is with great diffidence that I pen a line of the church 
conditions as I found them, and what I shall say soever shall 
be with becoming modesty and self-restraint of uncommon 
rigor. Suffice to record that the denominational leaders of 
that era know something of how hard bestead and fiercely set 
upon I was from the very beginning. The church had had a 
long tutelage under able men against the plans and policies of 
the denomination. In fact, this church was the last great bul- 
wark of the stalwarts of the old regime of reactionism. Burle- 
son College was sought to be made the educational storm cen- 
ter around which the defenders of the old gritty uncompromis- 
ing and unyielding spirit should gather. The religious war that 
burst around me in most fateful fury was probably the bitterest 
and most intensive internecine church battle of modern times. 
The strife was continuous and merciless. Quarter was neither 
asked nor given. On one side, fought the defenders of the old 
order ; on the other side were the battling hosts of a sane New 
Testament denominationalism. The lines were clearly drawn ; 
the issue was unobscured and the great controversy took place 
upon an arena swept for action. 

The net results of the last clash of debate and final shock 
of contending forces were: the church was definitely aligned 
with the Baptist General Convention of Texas — Burleson Col- 



62 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

lege was immutably placed in the correlated school system of the 
State, and the relation between myself and church as pastor was 
forever severed. Some abler and more disinterested pen than 
my own should one day give the public a veracious and elaborate 
narrative of this unprecedented battle of principles. 

Shortly after the close of my work at Greenville I was 
called to the church at Nacogdoches, away down in the red- 
lands and piney woods of East Texas. Historic associations of 
unusual interest gather around the name and peoples of this 
old place. Here is the scene of one of the most romantic love 
adventures of General Houston. There is the oak under which 
the old General delivered his famous speech called "Another 
Roar from the Old Lion." In the densely shaded city cemetery 
is the monument perpetuating the memory of Jeremiah M. 
Rusk, Secretary of War in the cabinet of the Republic, and with 
Houston, one of the first senators in Congress of the new state 
of Texas. A little way out from town is the old Rusk resi- 
dence, on the edge of the back porch, of which the great war- 
rior and statesman, heartbroken over the dissolution of the 
Union and the secession of Texas, in a moment of irresponsible 
despondency took his own life by blowing out his brains with a 
shot gun. So weak and helpless are the strongest of men in the 
unlooked for hour of dissolving calamity. 

The Baptists were relatively late in entering Nacogdoches, 
but when they did come it was with the swing of confidence and 
the tread of victory. Always had they been strong in the sur- 
rounding country. Old North Church, four miles north of 
the city, claims the honor of being the first non-Catholic organ- 
ization in the Republic of Texas. 

My inaugural as pastor was celebrated in the just finished 
new church building. No outstanding features characterized 
my quiet ministry here. The work was hard but the ingather- 
ings justified the arduous toils of a nervously anxious man. 
The contrast between this and my former charge was refresh- 
ingly restful. The Baptist Church with a bound leaped to the 
fore. It was so far in advance of the other churches of the city 
that it had no rival. I held two good meetings with H. S. Wolf- 
john, a Baptist of Hebrew blood, and a vocalist of unchallenged 
merit, leading the singing. The strong men of the community 
heard my preaching and supported my ministry. In the ad- 



PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 63 

jacent country my labors were many. The summer excursions 
that I made to the country-side forged unbreakable bonds of 
countless friendships and cemented a fellowship with country 
preachers as lasting as love itself. Among those preachers 
were Rev. H. M. Hutson, Rev. J. E. BuUard, and Rev. J. A. 
Smith, now of Carthage, and Rev. W. T. McMullen, the Nestor 
of the Baptists of Angelina County, and Rev. S. F. Baucom, 
whose flaming zeal and unquenchable enthusiasm have long 
since made his name a household word with performing Texas 
Baptists. 

Within a little more than a year in the midst of my Nacog- 
doches pastorate two crushing sorrows bore down upon my 
heart and home. I was called to Longview to see Earle, my 
baby brother, die. He was ever my peculiar pet, and the pathos 
of his fatherless state and his trustful confidence in me, and his 
almost idolatrous affection for me made him more like a son 
than a brother. The little fellow had just entered Baylor Uni- 
versity, and was immediately infected with typhoid germ. 
When I reached his bedside the crisis had come and hope had 
fled. His mind was clear, he knew us all and could talk. Nerv- 
ing myself for the ordeal I entered the death chamber and ap- 
proached his side and said, "Earle, dear boy, do you remember 
the night in Paris at the tabernacle meeting when you professed 
faith in Christ and joined the church, and do you remember the 
next Sunday afternoon when I buried you in baptism in the 
pool of the West Paris Church? Does that profession and 
that ordinance hold good yet?" The parched lips opened and 
the dying boy said, "Yes," and then he turned on his side and 
was gone. 

The next day we put him away under a mound of flowers 
in the beautiful Greenwood cemetery at Longview, and as the 
carriages turned to go I looked back, and the slanting rays of 
the setting sun shot through the flowers on that new made 
mound and lit all with flaming glory; and there came to my 
mind the epitaph the old Scotch teacher wrote for the tomb of 
the young scholar, "They shall bring the honor and the glory 
of the nations unto it." 

This was one October, and the very next October death 
stalked into our own Nacogdoches home almost unannounced. 
Our third son and baby was Charles Edward, as handsome 



64 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

and lovely a child as ever gladdened the hearts of father and 
mother. He was just twenty-two months old, an age of the 
most entrancing interest. He had the placid brow and blue eyes 
of his mother, and he was the joy of the house and the charm 
and delight of visitors. I can remember but two words that 
he ever spoke, on a country trip once he mimicked the bleating 
sheep, and I thought the feat so precocious and cute. One day 
he had a little cold. The stubbornness of the ailment was not 
detected, and no alarm was felt. I made a cross country trip to 
a Baptist association, and on coming home a glance at the baby 
in bed made me cast a look of frightened inquiry to the mother. 
She answered my mute question of agony by saying: "Yes, 
Charles is very sick, he has been getting worse ever since you 
left." Then I noticed that our physician. Dr. Tucker, was mak- 
ing very frequent calls. In a little while Dr. Tucker was bring- 
ing other doctors in consultation. Still later staunch friends 
and anxious neighbors began to drop in. Whispered dialogues, 
serious shaking of heads, soft and rapid footfalls upon the 
floors and baffled expressions upon the faces of doctors warned 
me to prepare for the inevitable. But I could not prepare. The 
shock was so sudden. The event so unexpected and the dread 
issue so undreamed of that I almost sank into a stupor of dumb 
despair. Before midnight the great enemy had won and the 
grim, reaper had done his work. Little Charles was dead ! Our 
baby was gone! And we were left stripped, heartbroken and 
desolate. As Oliver Cromwell said over the death of his son, 
even so I say : "It went to my heart like a dagger ! Indeed, it 
did.'' I was amazed at my own weakness and dumb at my own 
inability to comfort the stricken mother. 

Tender hands immediately dressed the little body, and some 
dear woman, thoughtful above the rest, put in the the fast stif- 
fening and closing dimpled hand of the dead child a beautiful 
rose. This was clasped to his breast, and it carried to our 
hearts its message of hope. Along toward two o'clock in the 
morning loyal friends, young men, bore the casket in the still- 
ness of that dead hour to the station and placed it upon the 
train. These friends were led by Thomas B. Lewis, Esq., now 
of Houston, Texas. He came all the way with us to Longview, 
and did not leave our side until the last sad rites were over. The 
journey was made by Shreveport, and every revolution of the 



PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 65 

wheels ground the iron of sorrow into our hearts. I remember 
while awaiting the Texas train in the Louisiana city I saw the 
rain fall upon the box that held the form of my child, and my 
heart was hurt again. It hurts now and always will hurt until 
"death is swallowed up in Victory." At Longview relatives 
and other friends mingled their tears with ours. A measure of 
relief came to us when Dr. A. B. McCurdy, himself now these 
many years in glory, read the scriptures and spoke the words 
and offered the prayer that told of the life to come. But there 
was one more wrench. As the casket lid was being closed, the 
resurgence of grief swept in a passion over my dear wife, the 
mother of the child, and I never can forget the piercing poig- 
nancy of her words as she said, 'T don't want them to take him 
away, I don't want them to take him away." I know some day 
the shadows will lift, and I shall see my baby again. 

A year or so after the break-up of my Nacogdoches settle- 
ment I began what was to be my longest consecutive pastorate 
with the First Church at Monroe, Louisiana. There was no 
jar in the removal from one State to the other. Church life 
in both was remarkably similar and the proximity of the two 
commonwealths gave the citizens of each an opportunity to 
know the other. Volumes could be written upon my five and 
a quarter years in Monroe. Probably not in the history of 
modern Christendom has there been a more unique tumult- 
uous, nor in some respects a more gloriously successful spiritual 
ministry. Monroe is a place of glaring contrasts. Ample 
wealth and dire poverty sat together on almost every block. 
Virtue and vice looked at each other across every street. Honor 
and knavery were together in all offices and public places. 
Since time immemorial the town has been notorious for three 
things : cotton gambling, poker playing and whiskey drinking. 
Morally and physically the atmosphere was heavy. Everywhere 
fetid smoke hung low over green tables. Moral sensibilities 
were blunted and spiritual discernment was blinded. The peo- 
ple lived on a low level of a debased fleshiness. I wrote up the 
town for the Baptist World some years ago in an article en- 
titled "A Tale of Sin and a City." I shall not burden this volume 
with things then said. 

With all the objections that could be raised against the town 
it was in many respects a fascinating place in which to live. 



66 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

Cookery was reduced to a fine art and the pleasures of the 
table were universal and abundant. The social life of all that 
section was richer and fuller than anything of the kind I had 
ever known. Vital religion was just beginning to have its day 
when I arrived in the city. Hitherto the churches had been 
tolerated, now they had to be reckoned with. A self-assertive- 
ness strange and incomprehensible to the old inhabitants was 
marking the activities and coloring the work of some of the 
more virile Christian bodies in the town. The Baptist Church 
worshiped in a beautiful frame structure on the finest corner in 
the city. This entire property was the gift over thirty years 
before of Mr. Hasley of Trenton, Louisiana. In the first year 
of my pastorate the church moved me out of the old inadequate 
parsonage into a commodious home that cost five thousand 
dollars. 

All the years of my ministry here were crowded with labors 
varied and abundant. I preached against the crying evils of 
the day. I struck madly and defiantly, if not always wisely, 
at liquor, gambing and the social sin. Something was all the 
time buzzing around my head. Meantime the people crowded 
the church building and the baptismal waters were constantly 
troubled. I marvel now that I came out of those awful con- 
flicts alive. Some wanted me killed and other men offered to 
do the bloody work. I was slandered, traduced, and spied upon, 
but in it all the Lord delivered me out of the hands of my 
enemies. And most of the old time leaders among my foes are 
now my friends. In December, 1917, it was my precious privi- 
lege to preach the dedicatory sermon for the debt-free $50,000 
church edifice that stands in serviceable beauty on the spot 
where I preached so long. One of my successors. Dr. J. U. H. 
Wharton, inaugurated this building enterprise, and another, 
Dr. F. H. Farrington, completed the structure and led the con- 
gregation in offering it to the Lord clear of incumbrance. 

Within a year or two of my settlement in Monroe my health 
began to decline. The church and congregation did everything 
possible for me. Vacations were ordered and I was sent upon 
trips from Cooper's Wells to a sea voyage. During my resi- 
dence here two children were born. Our only girl and an addi- 
tional boy. 

When after five years the state of my health became truly 



PASTORATES IN THREE STATES 67 

alarming, and the older children were mature enough to ob- 
serve the hideous moral conditions of the city, I knew that there 
must be an immediate and radical change of location. There- 
fore, I encouraged the overtures of the First Church of Ruston 
and early one April I assumed the burden and accepted the 
leadership of Baptist affairs in the cultural center of the Louis- 
iana hills. For some years the church at Ruston had been one 
of the leading Baptist congregations of the State, but in the 
near past it had fallen upon evil times. The old house of 
worship was not adequate to the needs of the growing city, 
nor commensurate with the worth and dignity of the church 
itself. The question of building involved the question of mov- 
ing. And the latter question brought on all the debate, stub- 
bornness, and logger-headedness that usually curse a church 
when once it has entered the field of uncontrolled controversy. 
Everybody wanted to erect a new temple of worship, but the 
voters were about evenly divided upon the location. North or 
South of the railroad, that was the question. Sentiment hard- 
ened around this one issue. Several good pastors had left the 
field in utter discouragement. 

I came just about the end of the period of disintegration. 
The discussion had talked itself out. The fires had cooled, the 
embers were smouldering, and it seemed that there was no pos- 
sibility of further conflagration. The leading spirits of the 
church assured me that my acceptance would be a signal for 
beginning the erection of a new building. So far as I could 
see things pointed that way. It seemed that the hour had struck 
and the moment was propitious. My predecessor had left think- 
ing the question of location for the new church forever settled. 
He had succeeded in persuading the church to buy valuable 
property on the opposite side of the railroad, but he had over- 
looked the importance of selling the old property. That gave 
the stand-patters a rallying place, and it furnished the senti- 
mentalists with all the tears they needed. Thus I found things 
and it seemed that the deadlock might remain and there would 
be another disrupted pastorate. Had it not been that the 
Presbyterian meeting house was accidently burned up by tramps 
who were without invitation making themselves at home there 
for the night, my Ruston ministry would not be a story worth 
the telling, but when the homeless Presbyterian congregation 



68 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

made us an offer for our property, there was a quick acceptance. 
In conference one Sunday morning the necessary formalities 
were gone through and the deed was done. 

Still the building proposition moved upon leaden feet. 
There was a sort of suUenness from the reaction of the fast 
transactions through which I had rushed the church, and it was 
apparent that the breaking ground for the new temple was 
many days off. I suffered many things for the lack of a per- 
manent house of worship. I preached in every airdome, every 
theater, tent, and in every pastorless church that we could hire 
in the city. In not a single comfortable and beautiful audi- 
torium was it ever my privilege to preach. We were home- 
less, constantly moving from pillar to post and never finding 
adequate accommodations or rest. I held a meeting in a half- 
tabernacle structure that netted the church exactly fifty candi- 
dates for baptism, one of these being my second son. 

The suspense of building bore heavily upon me and doubt 
as to my ability to see our plans consummated brought on a 
recurrence of my old time invalidism. My strength was sapped, 
my confidence was waning, and my nerve was going. 

Here our last child was born and for the first six months 
of his life the tragic illness of the baby almost cost the lives of 
his father and mother. Twice did our Sunday school superin- 
tendent dismiss the Sunday morning service because of the 
physician's belief that the pastor's baby was dying. Fourteen 
nights in succession I carried the suffering child in my arms 
the livelong night. But the Lord was gracious and the child 
lived and he is now a promising schoolboy nine years old. 

At length subscriptions for funds for the new church build- 
ing were started on a scale large enough to create confidence 
and inspire hope, and I had the deep satisfaction of seeing the 
basement walls of a new church rise from the excavation. Then 
I left and came back to Texas, but that is another story that 
will be told in chapters that follow. 



CHAPTER XI 
EVANGELISTIC WORK AT LARGE 

I had always wanted to be an evangelist and in every pas- 
torate I had done more outside work than was good for my 
home work. Everywhere my charges had complained of my 
frequent and long absences. I cannot say that the criticism was 
not just, but the temptation of change was too great for me, 
and I could not resist the insistent calls that came from every 
quarter. On retiring from the pastorate in Nacogdoches I had 
a full and fair chance to try out my evangelistic qualifications. 
No pastorate opened and I was forced to do the work of an 
evangelist. For more than a year I held meetings in Texas, 
Louisiana and Mississippi. During these months we made our 
home with Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Mobberly, the father and mother 
of my wife, at Longview. Here our son Joseph, now a lad six^ 
teen years old, was born. 

While I held some fairly successful meetings and made a 
support for my family, I do not think it was ever intended that 
I should startle the world by my evangelistic abilities. My 
engagements were mostly in the smaller places, and in these I 
had the happiest results and the best pay. After working as 
independent evangelist for more than a year, I was confirmed 
in the conviction that my sphere was to be a pastor and a pas- 
tor's helper. I do not think that I was a failure, but most 
certainly I was not a sensational success. I held meetings from 
Mineral Wells, Texas, to Welsh, Louisiana, and from Royce, 
Texas, to Crystal Springs, Mississippi. My first engagement 
was with Rev. John Mare at Lufton, Texas. This useful min- 
ister of Jesus Christ has long since been gathered to his fathers. 
Next I had a roaring meeting at Huntington in Angelina 
County, where there were many converts, a church organized, 
and where a building fund was raised. Rev. W. T. McMullen 
was then and is now the pastor of that prosperous congregation. 

My career as evangelist broadened my horizon, widened my 

69 



70 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

fellowship, and greatly deepened my love for an enlarging circle 
of brethren. Therefore, when I reentered the pastorate at 
Monroe, Louisiana, it was with the fervor of an evangelist. I 
held meetings without number in every part of the Pelican 
State. I preached from forty squares below Canal Stret, New 
Orleans, to within shouting distance of the Arkansas Hne. 
There is scarcely a parish in the State, the citizens of which can 
understand English, in which I have not tried to preach the 
gospel. I preached to the midnight shifts in the saw mills and 
to the indifferent mobs in the cities. I certainly was in labors 
abundant and in tears oft, and distresses of many kinds for the 
gospel's sake. I had every variety of experience to which mor- 
tal preacher may be heir, and withal many mountain top joys 
over countless souls coming home to God. While at Monroe I 
made a trip East to see my brother, going and returning by 
sea, and in Boston harbor I preached on the battleship Ver- 
mont ; and aboard the Comus on the homeward bound voyage. 
I preached one Sunday in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. 



CHAPTER XII 
THE COLLEGE OF MARSHALL 

In November, 1910, I came back to Texas and settled as 
pastor of the First Baptist Church at Marshall. I was disposed 
for several reasons to return to the Lone Star State, but I did 
not want to locate so near the eastern border, and I had never 
been an admirer of Marshall, or of its churches, but when I 
saw the substantial old town spread out over its seven hills 
and manifesting evidences of continued growth, I was im- 
pressed with its importance as a preaching center. Town and 
country had been aroused to combat the evils of the liquor 
traffic and in a fiercely contested campaign the demon rum had 
been banished from the city and county, so I came to a saloon- 
less city. A veritable passion of patriotism and rage for 
cleaner living had made the Prohibitionists victorious. How- 
ever, I had no illusions about the place or the church. I knew 
the former was hard and reactionary, and that the latter was 
provincial and without vision, but my duty seemed clear and 
opportunity was inviting. I knuckled down to four years of the 
bitterest toil of my life. I soon discovered that the church did 
not want to do big things. It shrank from burdens, winced at 
hardships, and complained loudly when pressed by imperative 
duties. I saw that my church and the Christian community and 
the Baptists throughout that section must be torn from their 
narrow moorings and that their static condition would have 
to be utterly broken up. To do this there must be a gigantic 
task and a tremendous appeal. The spiritual and intellectual 
inertia had to be completely shattered. In a way most splen- 
didly practical and beautifully providential the means of accom- 
plishing my desires and achieving my high purposes came to 
hand. 

There was a whirlwind campaign on for Southern Meth- 
odist University, Dallas, Texas. On an appointed Sunday a 
party of eminent churchmen visited Marshall and raised several 

71 



72 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

thousands of dollars from the Methodists of the city. So 
pleased were all concerned at the results of the financial appeal 
that on Monday night a banquet was given the contributors in 
the basement of the First Methodist Church. I was one of a 
number of invited guests. The occasion was one of rare good 
feeling among our Methodist brethren. Their leading men 
felicitated each other, praised the educational work of the 
church, and said not a little concerning the majesty of Dallas 
and the wealth of central Texas. When called upon to speak I 
most warmly congratulated my Methodist brethren upon the 
unparalelled feat of such quick and effective estabHshment of 
so great an institution as their new university. Then I turned 
to sing the praises of my own town. I told of its population, 
wealth, vast surrounding area of backward country and the un- 
believable distance to higher institutions of learning, and wound 
up by challenging the Methodists or Presbyterians to make no 
mean educational coup by planting one of their colleges in 
Marshall. As I sat down the gentleman at my right, Mr. M. 
Turney, a capitalist, promoter and withal a leading Methodist, 
said: "If you will build a Baptist college here I will give you 
the first thousand dollars." That proposition put ideas into my 
head. More thoughts about the school came to me, for as I 
walked home at midnight Mr. P. G. Whaley, another eminent 
Methodist, said to me, "Build that school and we'll give you the 
next thousand dollars." 

From that moment the thing would not down and I had no 
rest. It filled my thoughts while waking and my dreams while 
sleeping. I trembled in delicious expectancy of the realization 
of a purpose and a vision formed when I was a tow-headed, 
barefoot boy. Immediately I began the search for a college site. I 
knew that we must have lots of land, enough for all school 
purposes and much that we could plot into lots and sell to pro- 
cure money with which to build the school. Returning one day 
with Deacon W. A. Harvey from looking at a prospective site, 
we stopped in the edge of an oak grove and let our vision sweep 
through the trees and rest upon the crest of a noble hill. My 
observation was: "The Lord made this for a college. We 
must have this land." 

To which Mr. Harvey replied : "Fm afraid you cannot get 
it. This is the Van Zandt estate and contains a hundred and 



THE COLLEGE OF MARSHALL 73 

forty acres. The heirs all live in Fort Worth, and I am told 
that they will not consider selling a part of this property. The 
purchaser must buy it all.'' 

From this time on my counsellors were Mr. M. Turney and 
M. P. McGee, Esq. Mr. Turney furnished the money and 
the financial advice, and Mr. McGee the nerve force, the optim- 
ism, boundless zeal, and technical legal knowledge that was nec- 
essary every day and every hour in the long negotiations. The 
three of us now centered our thoughts and contributed our time 
almost without reserve to this college proposition in the prac- 
ticability of which none believed but us. 

On Thanksgiving night Mr. Turney and Mr. McGee came 
to my house and advised me to leave on the late night train for 
Fort Worth, to consult with General Van Zandt with regard 
to the acquisition of the property we needed. Mr. McGee 
gave the first actual cash ever contributed to the college. The 
amount was a ten dollar bill to help defray my expenses to Fort 
Worth. My wife added to that fund by letting me have part of 
a marriage fee that I had made that day, and turned over to her. 
My visit to Fort Worth opened the question of sale and later in 
the winter Major Jarvis and his wife, other heirs, came to 
Marshall and made me a definite proposition. They offered me 
one hundred acres, the choicest and best located part of the 
estate, for $25,000, one third cash, balance due in one year at 
eight per cent interest. This proposition was quickly accepted. 

The money for the first payment was borrowed from Mr. 
Turney's bank and notes were executed for deferred payments. 
The land was surveyed and fifty acres in the center of the tract 
was sacredly set apart for specific college purposes. This is the 
size of the campus. The remainder was cut up into lots and put 
upon the market. Mr. W. A. Harvey purchased the first and 
the highest priced lot. We soon sold enough lots to pay the 
indebtedness on the land. Then there was a great lot sale put 
on, running up above $40,000 worth to get cash in hand with 
which to build. Later there was a campaign for voluntary con- 
tributions from the citizens, the aggregate of this subscription 
being $47,000. Two years later still, the citizens of Marshall 
gave $25,000 cash toward the erection of one of the new 
dormitories. The physical property of the school as it now 
stands consists of a fifty-acre campus, three brick buildings, 



74 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

and three frame structures, and a leased large house, used 
as a girls' co-operative club. 

The original holding board of trustees was composed of 
Messrs. E. Key, M. Turney, M. P. McGee, E. L. Wells and 
myself. I was the only active Baptist on the board. Mr. Wells 
was president of the City School Board, and in church affilia- 
tion he was an Episcopalian. He was an inspiring supporter, 
a gentleman of the old school, whose radiant faith in the poten- 
tialities of our dream kept us in good hope. The city of Mar- 
shall responded to our every appeal with alacrity and unprece- 
dented generosity. From the start the town adopted the school 
as its very own. In all the distracting commotions of munici- 
pal jealousies and antagonisms, the school idea and fact have 
been the one unifying agency. The college has been the rallying 
center of the energies of the people and the chosen object of 
their benefactions. The other denominations and the non- 
Christian portion of our population were far more enthusiastic 
for the school than were the Baptists at first. Others had more 
faith in us than we had in ourselves. 

But many pains shall afflict him who is a dreamer of dreams 
and builder of schools. Only the seer knows with what leaden 
feet reforms do move and only the creator of a new thing can 
properly feel the awful pull of the backward surge of an un- 
aroused peoples' indifference. 

I remained in the pastorate and held on to my pulpit for 
the power these positions would give me as I pushed the school 
enterprise. But for two years I did not dare mention the col- 
lege from my pulpit. I knew that public talk from the rostrum 
would bring on a violently unfavorable reaction among the Bap- 
tists. Therefore, I let the leaven work without and from the 
outside life coals were finally put upon creeping Baptist's backs. 
In time the church did respond nobly to the appeal and did rally 
heroically to the enterprise. 

For two years I fought shy of the Baptist newspapers and 
I had a care as to what I wrote to the denominational press. 
Our people were overburdened with small, badly located strug- 
gling schools, some of them just gasping for breath. The lead- 
ers did not want any more crying babies on their hands, nor 
were they anxious to furnish crutches to any more limping 
schools. As fugitive scraps of news would filter out of Mar- 



THE COLLEGE OF MARSHALL 75 

shall to denominational headquarters, low rumblings of dissent 
would be heard. More than once lines like this appeared in the 
Baptist Standard, *'Let no over-zealous brother start an inde- 
pendent school or college." This kept up for a year or two. 
I had a letter from Secretary Barton of the Educational Board 
and from Dr. J. M. Carroll, then of Oklahoma, asking if rumors 
about a new college at Marshall were veracious. Those editorials 
and letters and warnings have not been answered yet. I could 
not reply without disclosing my plans and these plans would 
have been regarded as highly chimerical by all who did not see 
what I saw and feel what I felt. When the hour should strike I 
meant to reveal all and this I was able to do in perfect time on 
the stroke of the clock. 

But leadership is a lonely and heart-breaking isolation. I was 
regarded as a half madman whose wild imagination had got the 
better of him. After talking an hour one day to a Baptist pas- 
tor, explaining to him the grandeur of the conception and flam- 
ingly rhapsodizing over the practical aspects of the whole 
scheme, his only answer was, "I shall not put any obstacles in 
your way." And at what I considered an auspicious moment I 
unfolded the whole idea to the Executive Board of our associa- 
tion. These good men sat unresponsive, inarticulate, and dumb 
to my astounding revelation. Ere this, however, all have been 
converted and all are friends of the institution on the hill. 

Mr. Thurman C. Gardner, now B. Y. P. U. secretary of 
Texas, was the first president. There was not a brick on the 
hill when he took charge. His office was the position of money- 
gathering, promoting and advertising. He did his work well, 
erected the main building, and sounded the name of the College 
of Marshall to the corners of the farthest country. Under the 
presidency of Dr. H. E. Watters the school opened with a large 
attendance and great expectancy. At the end of the first school 
year Dr. Watters left for Union University and Dr. John S. 
Humphreys became president. The college is now on the last 
lap of the second year. It has survived the war, devastating 
droughts, crushing reversals, and ravaging epidemics. It now 
belongs to the Baptists of the entire State. Its destiny is what 
they shall elect to make it. A superior faculty has been em- 
ployed and organized and the future seems as bright as the 
promise of God. It should stay here with its ever-deepening 



76 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

services and widening ministries to the hungry-minded youth 
of East Texas until the Master comes. 

Dr. Truett calls the College of Marshall the romance of 
religion. It would be unjust to true historicity and outrageously 
offensive to my own final feelings were I not to here record 
the distinguished services of Education Secretary A. J. Barton 
in bringing to fruition the deep-laid plans of local leaders. 
With wonderful self-poise, marvelous sagacity, and a splendid 
mastery of a great situation, Dr. Barton remained in Marshall 
for weeks and made the school triumph over every obstacle. 
The big men of Marshall to this day regard Dr. Barton as the 
greatest living Baptist leader. 



CHAPTER XIII 
THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN MY PREACHING 

If to properly analyze the qualifications and evaluate the 
mental and spiritual worth of another be a work of wisdom, 
then a just appraisment of one's self is the task of genius. The 
manner and content of my preaching were different from the 
vast majority of other ministers, if not better. I may have been 
too original. I had to pick up my training and dig out my mat- 
ter. The first baptistry in a church I ever saw I used it and 
the first associational gathering I ever looked upon, my church 
was host to the body. I learned church procedure as best I 
could by reading, observing, hearing. Proper pulpit manners 
I had to acquire and I had to school myself severely in the 
manner of public address. There were many excrescences 
that should have been toned down by expert training, and there 
were many deep defects that should have been exorcised by the 
merciless surgery of capable criticism. But I evidently pos- 
sessed some elements of strength that might have been weak- 
ened by a too technical course of training. The papers and ar- 
dent admirers did sometimes say that I possessed a vigor, a 
dash, and a command of English, and a pulpit poise, that were 
the joy of my friends and the despair of my rivals. I make no 
comment upon the above, but simply record it in passing. 

At times my style of delivery was so furiously forensic 
that many of my auditors thought me too belligerent. The tor- 
rential outbursts were the eruptions of my long pent-up Gallic 
passion. My French impetuosity rushed me into the fine frenzy 
of the oratory of high abandon. In these onsets of unusual ver- 
bal fierceness my purpose was to annihilate the evil I was at- 
tacking. There were, indeed, in my charges and assaults 
intimations of real warfare and imitations of genuine battle. I 
thought it my business to demolish every obstruction of the 
truth. I considered it my province to strike at the head of 
every error. I thought that by sleepless vigilance and oft-re- 

77 



78 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

peated sledge hammer blows I might in a decade or two spy 
out all sin and eradicate evil from the earth. Therefore, I 
charged and counter charged. 

Let me not convey the impression here that I was a trucu- 
lent theological combatant, seeking controversy and ever dying 
for dispute. I was not. My startling outbursts and aggressive 
deliverances against certain flagrant sins and devitalizing doc- 
trines were the exceptions and not the rule in my preaching. 
But the people will judge a public man by those attributes they 
see in him which most please or irritate them. Therefore, 
despite the pleading tones in my voice and the witchery of 
winsome words which I tried to cultivate, I was all too often 
loked upon as a storm-tossed battling man who knew not the 
tenderer side of peoples or gospels. 

Another fruitful source of trouble to me and ground for 
disappointment upon the part of the people in me was the high 
expectation aroused by my fiery discourses. When I went to 
a new pastorate the people listened with ecstasy and sat down 
in contentment, fully believing that the whole town would rush 
into our church because of my ministry. They thought, too, 
that the finances would take care of themselves and they impa- 
tiently awaited the miracle that never came. I was ever the 
victim of the high hopes I had inspired. Thus often my best 
preaching undid me. The psychology of this is understandable 
to him who thinks. 

Visiting I always abominated. I mean the regular routine 
of calling from house to house. To this day I do not see the 
religion or wisdom of it. I drove myself to the task, however, 
and for fifteen or twenty years I did more visiting than any pas- 
tor I knew. It was a privilege to minister to the poor, to the 
stranger, the distressed, the sick and the dying. Upon these 
classes I freely expended my bodily strength and poured out my 
heart's best affections in liquid love. The unconverted were 
my especial care and the unchurched men who labored in store, 
shop and office, counting-house and factory, received my pas- 
toral care and kindliest attentions. But I did resent most 
emphatically being nagged about general visiting. The idea is 
prevalent among church people almost universally that the 
pastor should call upon his women parishioners in their homes 
at oft-repeated times during the year. Where and when this 



CONCERNING MY OWN PREACHING 79 

custom arose and what the idea back of it, I do not know. But 
Ido know that the chief pastor of a modern church cannot meet 
these puerile demands. Many is the time I have called upon 
supposedly sick people who were not half so ill as I, or mem- 
bers of my family, whom I had left uncared for at home. 
Zealous members have prevailed upon me to neglect pressingly 
important duties and hurry to homes where was rumored an 
illness. Again and again I have arrived at such places to find 
the sick person well and pursuing his usual vocations. 

There is a ridiculous side to it, too, for a man of sensibility 
and pride. What a spectacle it is for passers-by to see a pastor 
frantically ringing a door-bell or pounding his knckles blue 
against the door of a house where no one will answer. It 
brings over the dominie a feeling of idiocy hard to endure. 

I was never a man of affairs in the pastorate; that is, I 
was no business manager, and I had no great organizing ability 
nor facility of administration. Mine was the mission of an in- 
spirer. Sordid details were beyond me, and the application of 
the principles I preached had to be made by the hearer. When- 
ever I had men of vision, responsiveness and executive ability, 
my church work went forward with a bound. But where vision 
failed and mental lethargy prevailed the wheels of Zion dragged 
and I esteemed my work a failure. I could only point out the 
way, direct the march, and shout the word of encouragement 
in tones that thrilled redeemed souls. It was never mine to 
degrade my ministry and debase my calling by looking after 
tables. I have the indubitable proof from all over the land 
where I preached that men and women, moved by the high 
Gospel Word have gotten under the burdens of the churches 
in a heroic manner and have nobly underwritten all the agen- 
cies of the kingdom. This is compensation sufficient to atone 
for my personal limitations in matters of detail. 

I think that I should never have been pastor in a small place. 
My consuming zeal too quickly burned over a village and my 
restless soul clamored for change and when my audience was 
the same, the pressure I put upon it was too insistent and too 
hard for a small community to bear. Mine was a message for 
the throngs and for the Bedouin tribes that tramped thru the 
larger places, stopping at each but for a moment to pray and 
hear, and then hurrying on with flying feet to translate into 



80 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

action and transmute into life the messages they had heard. 
So convinced was one of the most discerning friends I ever 
had that he told me in great love that I should not stay at any 
church more than fifteen months. He was kind enough to say 
that the character of ministry I gave should be passed around, 
that it was my mission to strike the high places and sound the 
lofty note of the loud bugle call for advancement, and that it 
was an injustice both to the churches and myself for me to re- 
main long at one place. Passing over the implied compliments, 
I believe there was large wisdom in the good brother's obsierva- 
tions. 

I have always magnified my ministry and gloried in the 
Gospel of Christ. I never could conceive a call as the narrowed 
invitation to serve just a church only. I always felt that my 
calls were to the city and the entire community. I find that 
Paul had this opinion. He speaks of his mission to Rome, to 
Ephesus, to Thesolonica, and Corinth. I never could confine 
my efforts to the Baptist Church of which I was supposed to 
be the bishop. I held my commission in holier fear and in vaster 
perspective. I regarded myself as the accredited ambassador 
of Jesus Christ to all within the bounds of my diocese. This 
conception is inimical to the ideas and prejudices of many 
churches. Not a few of my pastorates were offended at my 
attitude and self-appointed leaders without number have com- 
bated the broader view I entertained, but ever pursued the 
course of my conviction as indicated above, and in not a single 
instance have the results other than justified my judgment and 
actions. 

The comic is not absent in the pastoral history of a positive 
man. Sometimes there is engendered among parishioners the 
insanest jealousy against the performing preacher. In one 
place a lawyer member of the church became bitterly envious 
of me and my reputation as if I had been his successful rival 
at the bar. A tribute to my talents from a non-Baptist towns- 
man would turn this man green with rage. 

Always have I felt that personality was the preacher's 
noblest prerogative. If he cannot so stress his redeemed man- 
hood as to make a lastingly emphatic impress upon his hearers, 
he is without doubt an ecclesiastical failure. If the preacher 
cannot so project himself into the lives of his men and women 



CONCERNING MY OWN PREACHING 81 

as to insure thru them the deathless persistency of the moral 
and religious principle, Ichabod is written over his name. The 
virtue must go out of him to his people and thus Kingdom 
leaders will be grown, givers will be developed, missionaries 
will be found, called, and sent ; teachers and evangelists will be 
discovered, and the immortal principle of the divinely implanted 
life upon a personality strong, unyielding, and conqueringly 
progressive will perpetuate itself in those who hear and will 
find its sweetest reward in the hardest service and the most 
quickening sacrifice. If there shall be any reward for me in the 
realm beyond the starlit dome, it shall be because I have been 
an inspirer. 



CHAPTER XIV . 
MINISTERIAL MISTAKES 

With only a modicum of courage and a faint trace of intel- 
lectual honesty, a chronicler might fill volumes on his own mis- 
takes and shortcomings. Mistakes with the best of us are so 
numerous that there is no surprise at their confession and no 
upheaval caused by their recital. I speak here only of the larger 
errors of my ministry. My first and greatest mistake was 
doubtless one of sermonic thought and deliverance. I probably 
attempted an ornateness that was not appreciated or needed by 
the vast majority of people who heard me. Then my discourses 
were directed primarily to the heads of my audiences. I should 
have shot lower, for probably they had hearts. It is a fatal 
mistake for a speaker to assume that his auditors are in his class 
in things of which he is master and they are not. The public 
speaker must be an authority when he dares come with prepared 
address before the people. They have to be awakened, aroused, 
interested. No crowd for long can be kept upon a high level of 
lofty thinking and solemn moral endeavor. Even the intel- 
lectuals in an audience will fall to the level of the masses and 
there will soon be a common mental ground. Then the most 
exquisitely cultivated like to unbend and they do dearly love 
to be relieved of the labor of hard thinking and the stress of 
sustained reasoning. I have seen the simplest stories based on 
the commonest background wake gale after gale of laughter 
and round after round of applause in the Southern Baptist Con- 
vention, and in the Texas Baptist Convention. The learned and 
dignified messengers enjoyed the convulsions of laughing irre- 
sponsibility. That speaker is a success who can make the people 
laugh and weep. Tears and laughter show that the elemental 
forces of a soul have been broken up and there is no going be- 
hind the fact of the power of him who can play readily upon 
the first chords. 

My second serious mistake was an internal and social one. 

82 



MINISTERIAL MISTAKES 83 

Always have I been possessed of a rage for the society of those 
I had reason to love, and I was inordinately fond of the pleas- 
ures of the table. I liked to go to dinners and still more did I 
like to give dinners. I rarely declined an invitation to dine out 
since that gave me an opportunity to come in contact with each 
member of the family and the friends of the household. At 
the homes of the very modest poor I have made my own en- 
gagements for meals. I did this to reach working men and 
boys who were at enmity toward the church and evidently 
dodging me. Not a little cornbread and bacon have I eaten on 
such occasions to the glory of God. The result in nearly all 
cases amply justified the audaciousness of the scheme. 

But reciprocity was my rule and practice. From the very 
beginning the people have come across the parsonage threshold 
in a continuous stream. Christian workers at large, denomina- 
tional agents, country preachers, and God's poor who were 
without the price of a meal were, of course, ever made welcome 
to the best we had. Then I did my best to capture and entertain 
the celebrities who came to town. I did this for the joy of their 
companionship and for the effect their uplifting personalities 
might have upon my family. That was an exacting and an ex- 
pensive sort of hospitality. Last of all, we kept open house 
day and night to our parishioners and local friends. Scarcely 
did we ever sit down to a meal that we did not have a table 
guest from the very vicinage of the parsonage. Every order, 
organization, and unit of the church we honored by receptions, 
always followed by refreshments. A turkey dinner was the 
annual feast prepared for the deacons and their wives. At 
less formal meetings of the deacons the collations were substan- 
tial, but more modest. My good wife, who is very conservative 
in utterance, says that we have averaged a guest at every meal 
since we have been keeping house. And she has often half- 
humorously and half-vexedly remarked that I must have gone 
down with a shotgun and have compelled some nomadic Bap- 
tist to accompany me home to dinner, for, surely, in no other 
way could I have had diners with such unfailing regularity. 

This course of mind had its favorable side and there were 
many compensatory results, but on the whole that line of pas- 
toral procedure was a colossal blunder. It destroyed the 
privacy of the home, made my overworked wife a slave to the 



84 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

appetites and caprices of guests, emptied the family larder, 
and drained the preacher exchequer. The gains were too in- 
consequential for such substantial outlay. While I revelled in 
the rgle of host, my wife toiled in the kitchen, and guests, filled 
to satiety with appetizing viands, too often lightly discounted 
the work of the pastor's wife and on leaving the table forgot the 
church. 

Let me set it down here as my opinion that it is a mistake 
for a minister to live next door to his meeting-house. The 
manse should be a comfortable distance from the church so that 
the residence might be a real home and not a free hotel con- 
ducted by the pastor's wife. 

My third and f atallest and most irretrievable blunder related 
entirely to money. This came by inheritance, by example, and 
by training. So far back as I can trace my ancestry, there is not 
on either side of my house a single forebear who had three 
grains of financial sense. I say this with becoming reverence 
and with all due filial piety, but it is a fact of such magnitude 
for untold harm in the entire race, that truth compels me to 
record it here. Few dollars, indeed, did I ever possess when I 
was a boy on the farm and I thought these were made to spend 
so soon or before they were earned. I could have a great day 
in town on half a dollar and sometimes I made it through with 
a quarter. The value and power of money were never taught 
us. We handled too little of coin and currency to be enamored 
of the magic of its worth. As a usual thing we saw money but 
once a year at harvest time in the fall when the cotton was 
gathered and marketed. The marts of trade were far removed 
from our humble abode, and so in the home there was little 
occasion and probably less disposition to instruct the children 
in the intricate mazes of financial affairs. 

The preachers scouted the idea of accumulating money and 
giving attention to what they called worldly things. When we 
went to high school and college we met the same frigid atmos- 
phere of affected contempt and disrespect for gold. Economics 
had not been properly correlated with our school systems. 
Everywhere the warning was shouted into our ears that we 
must beware of the lust for gain and treat with lofty disdain 
the circulating medium of the realm and everything that repre- 
sented property. This long indoctrination of false teaching has 



MINISTERIAL MISTAKES 85 

brought me many pains through the years, and borne 
much bitter fruit in the garden of my ministry. I never was 
able to completely face about and rectify the false trend given 
me in the beginning. The early twig was bent and so the tree 
did grow. 

Humiliating embarrassments have crowded upon me at 
every turn in the stony pilgrimage of my upward climb. I 
thought it beneath my heavenly calling to bargain with churches 
over salaries. I never in my life set a figure or made a monetary 
demand. I took what was offered me and received it when it 
was collected, sometimes long overdue. I bore in my own 
body the complaints of creditors and their cold-blooded busi- 
ness exactions. I never did get money enough to come clear 
with my living expenses. I was always paying out, but never 
able to entirely overcome the incubus of debt. I had never 
lived in a commodious and attractive parsonage unless I built 
it or led the church in buying it, and of all my pastorates, but 
one ever increased my salary. My active ministry was at an un- 
fortunate period in denominational development. The churches 
were outgrowing the old c ^.% "r and were struggling to adjust 
themselves to the new. The imancial was the last and most dif- 
ficult phase of the ecclesiastical transition. Everywhere I went, 
disintegration had set in, and I was usually too impatient to 
await a time of settling and the new day. Therefore, I was 
always preaching to churches that were in the formative pe- 
riod. I rarely reaped the benefits of my own labors or those of 
my predecessors. Mine was the solitude of the pioneer. I 
wrought not often on another man's salvation. Sometimes I 
tore down with the fury of an iconoclast in order to clear the 
ground for the kind of structure I hoped to erect. 

I conclude this chapter by expressing the opinion that there 
should be a school of business for preachers in all our colleges, 
and that the economic side of the ministry should receive due 
stress in our seminaries and theological institutions. Shorn of 
economic independence, the pastor is an unspeakable slave and 
a mendicant without the dignity of membership in the order of 
the begging friars. The churches must be taught their duty 
and their responsibility, for have we not all heard Dr. Gambrell 
tell the story how the old Mississippi deacon in his prayer said : 
"Lord, keep our pastor humble. We keep him poor." 



CHAPTER XV 
PUBLIC ISSUES AND PLATFORM COMBATS 

Ever since the lyceum course at Hineman University School, 
Monticello, I had longed to be a lecturer. The freedom of the 
platform appealed to me, and the applause of enraptured audi- 
ences was sweet to my vaulting ambitious soul. Not a few 
times during my school days did I try my powers upon school, 
church and court-house platform. I went out of town surrep- 
titiously with a look of far away importance on my face and, 
according to my reception, returned beamingly radiant or un- 
mistakable crest-fallen. I have these last few days received a 
letter from a country school superintendent in far Western 
Texas, telling me that he heard me in an Arkansas mountain 
town over twenty-five years ago. I was sent out to represent 
the college president, and this Texas educator is one of a num- 
ber of mountain boys who heard me. I never knew of 
his existence until his letter came. The young undergraduate's 
address surely was not in vain if it created leaders of light and 
learning for Texas plainsmen. 

I was hardly settled in my Longview pastorate before I was 
out on the road, filling speaking engagements at the smaller 
places. I first assayed to trace the life of Christ by the lines 
of a chart, but this was foreign to my method of address and 
I soon exchanged the map for high-sounding titles at the head 
of my extemporaneous lectures. As opportunity offered, I car- 
ried my messages to surrounding communities, going as far 
afield as from Carthage to Big Sandy. The expenses of my itin- 
erary were borne by voluntary contributions at the close of the 
speech. I believe these always met my traveling outlay, but 
there was not much additional left for an honorarium. I think 
six dollars was the maximum offering I received, but the travel- 
ing was good, the fellowship was fine, and the experience was 
educational to a degree. 

I remember about this time fulminating against the Cath- 

86 



PUBLIC ISSUES AND PLATFORM WORK 87 

olics, and hurling anathemas against the saloon, this latter 
from my own pulpit. Later high schools and colleges so be- 
sieged me with invitations for special speeches and commence- 
ment addresses that all my desires in this line were more than 
gratified. My circuit extended over nearly all Texas and my 
taste was so democratic that I went with marvelous facility 
from the largest to the smallest places and vice versa. My 
church at Paris starred me in a pay lecture. This was the first 
time that I ever had real tickets sold for hard money. My 
theme was, "Shall we Fight?" having to do with the imminency 
of war with Spain. I strongly urged that we take the initiative 
in the outbreak of hostilities. My audience was in warmest 
sympathy and heartiest accord with all I said ; and so soon as 
news of my attitude got to the public thru the papers, the Con- 
gress declared war on Spain! This was probably the most 
dynamic international deliverance that ever fell from my lips ! 

After going to Louisiana I became the protagonist of every 
variety of subjects for the commonweal. I campaigned for 
local school taxes and I precipitated a prohibition contest, the 
bitterest and most dangerous I have ever known, which culmi- 
nated only last year in a victory for the forces of righteous- 
ness. Under local superintendents and the State Superintendent 
of Public Instruction, I was tirelessly engaged in tax cam- 
paigns throughout the hill section, and the State Superintendent 
was kind enough to say that I never lost in an election. While 
at Ruston I revived my pay-as-you-enter lecture scheme. In my 
old pastorate at Monroe my new offering on "Democracy and 
Leadership" was graciously received by an audience of flatter- 
ing size and a monetary response that should satisfy the un- 
spoiled desires of a normal man of provincial fame. Then 
the educational institutions of the State called upon me and I 
spoke in the chapel of colleges from Ruston to the Gulf. Be- 
fore leaving the State my last engagement was with the Normal 
at Natchitoches, where the now widely-known Congressman 
Aswell was then president. 

When on coming back to Texas my lyceum star dimmed and 
hung low in the firmament. So exhausting and arduous was 
my pastoral toil that I had neither time nor strength for the 
noblest fancies and the highest flights. I bore burdens like a 
pack-horse and wallowed in the bogs of unrequited toil like 



88 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

an ox, and never again did my imagination take wings, nor did 
my stage oratory again blaze into glory until the conflagration 
of the world war broke my heart and set on fire my tongue. 

One amusing weakness that I was never often permitted 
to indulge will excite the risibles and bring laughter to the lips 
of my readers. The dearest wish of my vain heart was to ap- 
pear upon the stage in the evening in full dress. Of course, I 
could not do this in the church, and my scissor-tale coat and 
acre of shirt front had to be reserved for secular institutions. 
While speaking in Ruston there was great uneasiness on the 
part of my wife and watchful friends in the audience. In all 
the redolence and pride of a borrowed dress suit I was labor- 
ing in many difficulties in the midst of my lecture when, lo, 
my handkerchief began to slip from its moorings under the 
vest. Loved ones in watchful waiting thought my shirt was 
coming out and their consternation can be better imagined than 
described. 



CHAPTER XVI 
MY MOTHER 

My mother was a Vaughan and was born seventy-three 
years ago on the Warrior River in Alabama. She was the eld- 
est of three children, and was brought up by her father, her 
mother having died when the children were very small. My 
mother does not remember her mother. My grandfather evi- 
dently was a man of dignity, fair education, good property, and 
a heart of great tenderness for his children. The family was 
not rich, but in comfortable circumstances. The land-holdings 
were not unduly large, and the number of negro slaves was 
limited to the needs of a small but paying plantation. The best 
educational advantages of the day and the locality were given 
my mother, her sister and brother. I have an idea that my 
grandfather taught the children himself, and then employed 
tutors and governesses. Somehow he succeeded in inculcating 
into his children the hardier rudiments of learning, and he must 
have instilled into their hearts at a very early age the most 
impressive lessons of honor to parents, reverence for age, and 
sympathy for affliction. One of the strong outstanding charac- 
teristics of my mother has been her idolatrous devotion to the 
memory of her father. Though I never saw him, through her 
I know him. The aged, too, have been her special care. She 
has consistently through a long life risen up before the hoary 
head and honored the face of the old man. She has been, too, 
the self-appointed attorney of the outcast and the poor. In her 
the veriest white trash had a staunch friend and a brave de- 
fender. 

What of my grandfather's property was left by the war was 
dissipated or utterly destroyed in the wreckless ravages of 
reconstruction. Like ten thousand other householders, my aged 
grandfather sat around his desolate fireside, surrounded by his 
needy children and looked intently into the dead ashes of his 
hopes. As has been set forth in the first chapter of this book, 

89 



90 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

when a young woman, my mother married my father, a middle- 
aged widower with grown children. Conditions in that part 
of the South then were deplorably bad. Nearly everything 
worth having had gone up in the flame of war, or was having 
the life tramped out of it by the dominance of the black hordes 
of irresponsible f reedmen. 

There was nothing for self-respecting poor whites to do 
but move. My father with his older family and new wife was 
constantly on the go. Not a few communities in Alabama 
claimed them as citizens and probably more in Mississippi. 
They lived and labored and suffered in every section of the 
two states. Reverses, financial and industrial, met them at 
every hand. Moving upon unimproved places and turning the 
new soil undermined the health of the entire family. Sixteen 
years ago I held a meeting on Lake Roe Buck in the Mississippi 
Delta, where more than thirty years before my mother had had 
typhus fever. 

My mother was a small, dark woman, with remarkable 
recuperative powers. She gave birth to six sons. I am the 
second. I remember only the picture and the grave of my old- 
est Httle brother. Only three of the boys are living now, myself, 
Lieutenant-Commander W. B. Tardy, United States Navy, and 
Percy Tardy, a railroad man at Bryan, Texas. Stanley Tardy, 
the fifth boy, a young physician in Shelby County, died sud- 
denly some years ago. I traveled all Saturday night and Sun- 
day on the train from Monroe, La., and then some miles by 
hack to reach the place of interment in time for the funeral. 
I just did arrive in time to look upon his face before the last 
words were said. It was a heart-breaking trip, and I was the 
lone relative of my dead brother at that strange graveyard. 

My mother was a Baptist of the old school. She believed 
in a heart change so radically vital as to be almost cataclysmic. 
She wanted full repentance, complete surrender, and undimmed 
spiritual illumination. How well I remember her face as she 
listened to the sermons and joined in the devotions at the 
country church. It was one alternating picture of tearful con- 
trition and soul radiance. Her voice had in song a haunting 
sweetness that brings to my heart calm and peace and blessing 
to this day. Her prayer life at home was constant. She 
slipped to some part of the dwelling, or place, every day where 



MY MOTHER 91 

she communed alone with her Lord — "and faith she did need it." 
What with the hurly-burly of farm life, the rough pioneering 
of the backwoods, the clashing interests of double families 
under one roof, and the petulant cries of five growing boys, a 
place where the Lord was wont to meet his petitioner was the 
supreme need of my worn, distracted mother. 

She, too, had problems of her own. She was not a placid, 
submissive creature. How could she be? Surely, the mother 
of six boys must have a good deal of the lion in her, but she 
fought bravely and faithfully to put the good in the ascendency. 
She watched over her boys with ceaseless vigilance. Her ambi- 
tion for them knew no bounds and her love was limitless and 
her sacrifices in their interests she counted a joy. In many 
respects I have never known such a woman. She had the most 
capacious mind for the names of persons I have ever met in my 
life. She was a quick and intent listener, an alert observer, 
and the most voracious feminine reader that ever conned the 
printed page. Had my mother been a man in war time she 
would have been a general, and in peace a governor. To this 
day she is an authority on personnel, from the days of her 
girlhood on the Black Warrior River in Alabama to the last city 
ward in which she has lived in Texas. 

But, oh! the pathos of her life! Always did she want a 
permanent earthly home, but never had one. She would have 
dearly loved to be settled, but it was her fate to live all over 
four different states. She was pushed or dragged from pillar 
to post all her married Hfe, and after the death of her husband, 
twenty-five years ago, the peregrinations continued. And 
troubles have closed in upon her with remorseless grip. Her 
brother and sister are long since dead and three of her boys 
have been gone these many years, and for five years this writer 
has been an incurable invalid. Ten years ago she fell and broke 
her hip and for this decade has walked perilously on crutches. 

Tho a small and frail woman and tho of the intellectual 
type, my mother has done every sort of manual labor that falls 
to the lot of the hungry poor in the remotest regions. She has 
hoed corn and chopped cotton and picked cotton with her little 
boys when they were too small to understand the dire necessity 
of sticking at the toil of the fields. She has washed and 
scrubbed and starched and ironed and sewed and mended and 



92 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

carded and knitted and spun and most of the time in health so 
indifferent as to involve the gravest physical hazard. 

Times without number when I thought myself abused and 
imposed upon by my father and other members of the family, 
I meditated running away from home. Clothes would be se- 
creted and boyish plans of immaturity formed, but at night the 
white face and pleading look of my mother would visit me in my 
dreams and in the morning thoughts of fleeing had vanished. 
My mother still abides in my humble rented house. Her hair 
has long since been as white as the driven snow, her hands are 
twisted, and her face is wrinkled. I believe she has lived this 
last half dozen years just to help take care of me. Her knotted 
hands are smooth and gentle as they tenderly touch my aching 
brow and with unexampled patience and a strength born of 
love unfathomable, she has tried, oh, so hard, to rub the pain 
out of my spine. I know that each night as she gives me the 
farewell kiss and goes sadly to her room that she has the 
dread fear that she will never see me alive again. But, surely, 
she has served her day and generation well, both in her own per- 
sonal endeavors and thru her, her children in church and State, 
and, oh ! the hundreds she has taught in Sunday school in coun- 
try, town and city. 

This poor tribute to her who bore me, nourished me, and 
loved me to the end, I write for the book that tells the tale of 
my own unworthy life. It will not be long, it cannot be long 
before her Savior will come to claim his own. She has ever 
been fond of singing, 

"Even down to old age all my people shall prove. 
My sovereign eternal unchangeable love." 

My hope in Him is that beyond Jordan's parting waters, 
mother and I shall both be made whole. 



il! 



CHAPTER XVII 
THE WONDER WOMAN— MY WIFE 

She has been mine for nearly a quarter of a century. I 
found her at Longview twenty-four years ago, when I entered 
upon the pleasant pastorate of the Baptist Church in that city. 
I saw her for the first time teaching a Sunday school class of 
girls up behind the organ. She was dressed in purest white, 
and that vision of entrancing loveliness lingers with me to this 
hour. When once in love my courtship was almost barbarously 
aggressive. I clamored, argued, and pleaded for my prize. It 
seemed that the answer was cruelly delayed. Months of wait- 
ing were like years to me. She was the daughter of Colonel 
and Mrs. James M. Mobberly, originally of Davies County, 
Kentucky. My wife was the eldest of seven girls, her name 
was Daisy, and she was brought up at Longview and educated 
at Potter College, Bowling Green, Kentucky. She was strong 
in mind, commanding in her native dignity, improved by train- 
ing, sweet in character, lovely in disposition, and beautiful in 
person. On the night of our wedding my chief groomsman 
told me before I had been permitted to see the veiled bride that 
she was the prettiest woman he had ever beheld. 

Contrary to the usual experience, my marriage strength- 
ened me in my pastorate. The woman I had won was of 
character so high and of superiority so universally recognized 
that there were no petty jealousies about my marriage nor 
criticism of my choice. It seemed to be the one thing to do 
and it was so apropos that in one chorus of praise the people 
acclaimed me most fortunate. My love was ever of the blood- 
red rose type. From my earliest recollection I have lived in a 
realm of romance; always some day did I expect to have a 
beautiful bride. The nethermost heat of a Gallic tempera- 
ment, when set on fire with passion's deathless flame, is not 
always pleasant companionship in the home. The too fervid 
lover is often unreasonably exacting and his demands may 

93 



94 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

degenerate into basest selfishness. To my jerky and persistent 
romanticism and furious frenzy of life's young love, there was 
as an offset my wife's calm imperturbability. A thousand times 
has she saved the day by her unruffled placidity. 

From the start our pace together has been most rapid and 
always have we had a hard time, but the saints and the world 
never knew it, for together we smiled at obstacles and with 
the inexhaustible resiliency of morning's glad strength we 
laughed away the Gorgon monster that crouched in our path. 
Children large and numerous were born unto us. For fifteen 
years, spaced about two years apart, the babies came, until 
there had been born six boys and one girl, all yet living except 
the little fellow about whose death I have written in another 
place. Can any fond husband ever forget the cries of young 
motherhood ? White and half-crazed, he is forever afterwards 
a changed man. My wife never rhapsodized over children 
and never sentimentalized about wanting babies, but she has 
made the sanest, steadiest, and most resourceful mother of my 
knowledge; and though she candidly admitted when pressed 
that she was not anxious for the pains of motherhood, she has 
borne the birth agony of all our children heroically and un- 
complainingly. So much for the contrasts in desire and doing. 

My wife was a lover of home and her dearest wish was for 
a lifetime habitation in some congenial place. This was never 
to be. We moved and moved and moved. Without upbraiding 
or loud bemoaning our fate, she lovingly followed me from 
town to town and church to church and house to house. Our 
wedding furniture was bruised and broken and our bridal gifts 
were smashed in transit. The little things that are so precious 
to a woman's heart have nearly all been destroyed or lost. The 
delicate reminders of maidenhood and the sweet mementos of 
girlish beauty and innocence have been ruthlessly consumed in 
life's fiery holocaust. She has been my pilot when I was on a 
ship where two seas came together. She has warned me off 
the treacherous rocks and has pointed my eye to the polar star 
and ever been the first to give the glad cry of land ahead. She 
has never upbraided me for my costly financial errors, nor has 
she chided me over the hugest ecclesiastical shortcomings. Her 
low, broad brow and tender blue eyes have turned to me alway 
with restful welcome and calm confidence. These virtues were 



THE WONDER WOMAN— MY WIFE 95 

forged in fierce heat and these graces flowered in a scorching 
school. What a patient hearing she gave my sermons for over 
twenty years and with what sweet interest she listened to all 
my wild schemes and with a maternal sympathy, born of an 
understanding that passes the knowledge of man, she soothed 
my ruffled brow, assuaged my uncontrollable grief, and in- 
stinctively pointed out to me the line of least resistance. 

But her fortitude grew to maturity in the long agony of 
my unrelievable affliction. Probably no woman aside from 
conditions of war ever bore more irksome burdens or faced 
more serious responsibilities so suddenly thrust upon her. The 
bolt that felled me shattered me so utterly that all who cared 
for me were stunned. My family and loved ones reeled under 
the blast. The problem of living was acute, the matter of bread, 
medicine, and nursing loomed menacingly large. I became 
such a care as in all probability never for so long taxed the 
strength, challenged the love, and wore upon the patience of 
mortal woman. My wife so completely lost herself in the ex- 
acting absorptions and huge demands of her helpless family 
and suffering husband, that her course seemed the simple line 
of duty rather than the heroic immolation that it was. With 
such quiet assurance, marked efficiency, and resigned dignity 
did she follow the thorny path of her appointed task that only 
the discerning immediately understood the marvels of her ex- 
cellence and the wonder of her love. Without the faintest 
show of reticence she accepted the decree of her hard sentence 
and proceeded to serve her long term with a song. 

In addition to care of me which was constant day and night, 
she had in the house a young family and my crippled mother. 
She was called to my bedside from one to twenty times each 
night. She took a correspondence course from the University 
in Home Economics and became an expert and scientific cook 
and an acceptable teacher. She made bread, the very odor of 
which would make one ravenously hungry. This she sold at 
a fancy price. She had classes in household economics, com- 
posed of the leading women of the city. Between demonstra- 
tion and lecture she would rush to my room to relieve my dis- 
tresses. She carried on a magazine subscription business that 
covered the city and reached to three states. She became an 
irresistible literary solicitor both by person and by mail. How 



96 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

she found the time to do all of these things, none will ever 
know. 

Then the first spring that we lived in the old rented house 
whose friendly shelter was tlie best we could obtain, the days 
were unspeakably calamitous. One boy fractured his arm, the 
baby had an almost fatal attack of pneumonia, the second son 
was operated on for appendicitis, and my wife's dear mother 
died. These adversities pounded on her heart like the blows of 
a trip hammer, but they neither made her afraid nor dismayed. 
I continued to live, but grew daily a heavier burden and a 
more dependent charge. There was not one thing I could do 
for myself ; physically I was a lump of helpless clay. Macaulay 
says, speaking of the death of Warren Hastings, that the great 
British Proconsul at a ripe old age sank into his grave with 
no degrading symptoms manifesting themselves in the malady 
that bore him away. Not so of me. She of whom I write has 
had to perform the most revolting service and endlessly return 
to the most repulsive duties, and in it all she had the wit to 
humor my whims. She has assisted me in imaginary business 
enterprises. She has stinted to buy stamps that I might carry 
on a correspondence that pleased me and made me think I was 
doing something. 

Had it not been that she was a strong woman, both of us 
had long since been in our graves. The grief of my heart is 
that her shoulders are bent from the leaden load she has carried 
so long and her white hands once so beautifully patrician are 
reddened and distorted by the cruel penalty of a sort of toil that 
it seems no woman should ever be called upon to endure. And 
in the cave of my physical horrors with every mental halluci- 
nation aiding and abetting the writhing agonies of a tortured 
body, she brought a sweetness and a light that made it possible 
for me to bear, to live, to think, and to work. 

Considerate treatment of me was the supremest test to 
which mortal could be put. Mine is the disease of the nerves. 
There is not a n.ive in me that does not tingle with pain or 
flare with flame. This causes an irascibility that will make an 
enraged hyena's screams sound impotently harmless. Always 
an irritable man and unreasonably oppressive to those I loved, 
my illness has accentuated my irritability often to the point of 
desperation. But in all my provoking outbursts of temper in 



THE WONDER WOMAN— MY WIFE 97 

only the rarest of instances has there been a reply in kind from 
the wonder woman. 

For two years my wife has been the superintendent of the 
dining hall of the College of Marshall, where by long hours of 
unmitigated and stressful toil and by an amiable demeanor 
beyond praise she has earned for us all our food and shelter. 
For over a half year she has not even been to church, so com- 
pelling are the calls, of home and her position of public trust. 
If modestly meeting the urgency of a great situation will insure 
a crown to any woman, then the stars are already being fash- 
ioned that will blaze in the diadem that shall encircle the brow 
of my wife. She rose to the occasion and a great destiny is 
hers. And so with the quenchless love of a dying man, I pay 
this all too unworthy homage to the wonder woman, my wife. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
THE CHILDREN OF THE MANSE 

Since an autobiography is expected to be a family homily 
and an exemplification of unblushing egotism I insert this 
chapter. I can write about my own children with due restraint 
because I have been their severest critic. I certainly can never 
be accused of too great leniency toward the weaknesses, fail- 
ures, and sins of those of my own household. I had high aims 
for my children and I drove them like Jehu. I made the mis- 
take of finding more faults with them than I did with all the 
other children of the parish. But with the older ones the 
strenuous discipline of the early day has already borne favor- 
able fruit. If only the good die young, our children are all 
predestined to unparalleled longevity. Every one of them had 
the temper of his father and all the dangerous Adamic pro- 
pensities. When my oldest boy was a little fellow I had to 
hurry to Sunday school to keep the young irrepressible from 
systematically fighting his way down the church aisle. That 
kid was some scrapper in his day. He fought thru his resi- 
dence in two towns and then his belligerent reputation aided 
him in bluffing his way thru all other places. 

My children were a surprise to me. This is trite to all ex- 
perienced parents, but it was as new to me when I made the 
discovery as if I had been the first father to whom the reve- 
lation had ever been vouchsafed. The repressive atmosphere 
of the parsonage only made the lid soar higher when it did 
go off. I have seen outcropping in my children nearly every 
sin I ever committed and even the evil desires that I have suc- 
cessfully repressed. I should like to write an elaborate treatise 
on the pathos of parenthood. 

Our children were all large, fine looking, and evidently quite 
healthful at birth, but accidents, illness, and diseases to which 
all flesh is heir have been from the beginning our bitter portion. 
The oldest and the youngest boys survived painfully baffling 

98 



THE CHILDREN OF THE MANSE 99 

physical ailments and their sufferings almost slew us. I can 
never forget the piercingly unconscious wails of my eldest son 
as he was coming out from under the anesthetic after an opera- 
tion. Surely the grass will never grow on the ground where 
I walked while the surgeons were busy with their instruments 
of pain ; and Halley's Comet was to me a familiar trail of fire 
in the eastern sky, for I saw it every morning for two weeks, 
because at that time I was bearing in my arms the livelong 
night the emaciated form of my scarcely recognizable baby boy. 

The comicalities of babyhood were an endless source of 
merriment. When the mumps invaded our home and found 
none 'of us immune, my oldest boy, who was the first to take 
it, came down stairs one morning with his face swollen as from 
the sting of bees and said : "Daddy, I had so big night, my jaws 
hurted me all night long." But I must make this chapter brief 
and as conveniently modest as one of my disposition can. 
William Thomas Tardy, Jr., is now a First Lieutenant in the 
373rd Infantry, San Juan, Porto Rico. He attended the Loui- 
siana Industrial Institute and Baylor University. He has 
taught school in three places, the last in the West Indies. He 
is inclined to be a linguist and is enamored of Latin America, 
and has been a journalist on newspapers in both Havana and 
San Juan. He graduated in the first oflticers' training camp at 
Porto Rico, received his commission, and became an instructor 
in the two following training camps. He assisted in training 
the Porto Rican Army for duty overseas and this contingent 
was to sail for France about the time the armistice was signed. 
He then became Intelligence Officer of the Island and a member 
of the Headquarters Staff, and he is yet furiously indignant 
because the Huns by their untimely collapse kept him from 
the Continent and, as he says, made it necessary for him to use 
spurs to hold his feet on his desk. 

James Noel Tardy is a Second Lieutenant in the Porto 
Rican Army, 373rd Infantry. He is our second son. His 
middle name comes from his mother's grandfather, who was 
Captain Noel of Kentucky, and who was killed in the fierce 
fighting around Franklin, Tennessee. So proud are all of the 
girls of the family into which I married of their mother's gal- 
lant father, that already four of them have a child named Noel. 
James is a curly haired, browneyed, handsome rascal. Those 



100 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

who know say that he got his eyes from Mrs. Noel, his maternal 
great grandmother. So freakish is heredity that emphatic 
characteristics remain quiescent for years and then break out 
again in the third and fourth generation. There follow around 
our fireside Joseph, in the age of indecision and fast running 
up Dr. Gambrell's famous hill ; the one girl of the house, Mar- 
garet, comes next. Then there is round-faced Francis, the fat 
image of his father, and a character. He hates soap, abomi- 
nates bath water, devours books, and loves all the great out- 
doors. And little Harold makes our family complete. There 
is nothing remarkable about these children except that they are 
mine. The only justification I have for writing about them at 
all is that I thought those who loved me would like to know 
something of those whom I loved, and may I not, in closing this 
chapter that I have written with fear and trembling, plead 
with those who read these lines to pray for the children whom 
I may so soon leave? 



CHAPTER XIX 
THE TRAGEDY OF A STRICKEN MAN 

The bolt was long poised with unerring precision, but I did 
not believe it would ever come, and when the blow did strike, 
it was with dreadful abruptness. An upstanding man believes 
every man mortal but himself. He cannot conceive that to 
him the summons shall come, and the more absorbed he is in 
the pressingly important duties that use and distract him, the 
more unthinkable that physical activity should cease. So self- 
centered are we all and so lost are the mightiest of men in the 
labors of their little day and so circumscribed are the loftiest 
of souls in thre small orb where their energies are to find an 
outlet for a brief time. I had had every warning that a smitten 
creature should need, but the voice of direful disease and pre- 
monitory pains did not carry to my consciousness the serious 
meaning of its tremendous import. For years my pallor had 
deepened, my energies had slackened, and my nerves had flared 
and slithered. Everything that devoted churches in Louisiana 
could do for me had been done. Summer vacations were voted 
me and my expenses were paid, but still the shadows deepened. 

Always had I been a highly strung individual. For twenty 
years I had lived on edge. I never knew the art of relaxation, 
my nerves were forever taut. Even my pleasures were bodily- 
consuming pastimes. I consumed more nerve force in leading 
the Sunday morning prayer at church than Russel Sage ex- 
pended in making a hundred thousand^ dollars. Being of 
French descent, my normal state was one of dissipation. For 
fifteen or twenty years I averaged more than a sermon or 
address a day, probably four hundred a year — these in addi- 
tion to all the other things I tried to do. I read books until 
eleven o'clock or midnight and then went on a round of calls 
on the critically ill, and later came back still too distraught for 
sleep, and read again until breakfast. In some of the cities of 
my pastorates there is not a block I have not been on every 
hour of the night and day. The woes of my people were my 

101 



102 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

own woes and the iron of a world's death agony entered my 
soul. Ever have I staggered under the load of a shuddering 
globe. My sympathy for others devitahzed my being. The red 
in my blood was burned up and the fluid that coursed in my veins 
was half water. Inveterate smoking and constant drinking of 
Louisiana black coffee without doubt made their contribution 
to my physical demolition. These ancillaries of a too busy life 
all conspired for my bodily overthrow. The final crisis crept 
upon me with stealthy and remorseless tread. My paling face 
and bending form pathetically haunted the resorts of the land. 
From Marlin to Washington and Hot Springs to Chicago mark 
a portion of the paths of my itinerary. Women on the Pull- 
mans marveled at my colorless face and sympathetic men came 
to my assistance as they noted my tottering steps. My wife 
cared for me at Hot Springs and for a month at Chicago, where 
we last sought relief by visitation to the high authorities in the 
kingdom of modern medicine. Here my wife balanced my 
wavering body in hotel corridors and trundled me in a roller 
chair to the office of a physician at the hospital for treatment. 
So self-deceived may one become about his own condition, that 
I thought I was improving when the great doctors were con- 
vinced that I was dying. I was under the care of the famous 
Dr. John B. Murphy and his staff of eminent specialists. The 
diagnosis was that I had lateral sclerosis (hardening of the 
lateral nerves), and I was fatefully near to pernicious anaemia. 
Though the head of a great Catholic Institution, Dr. Murphy 
did everything possible for me and placed at my disposal the 
abilities and services of his incomparable assistants, all free of 
charge. In fact the only doctor's bill I have paid since my 
affliction was to a Baptist doctor at a hotel in Chicago. But the 
authorities in Dr. Murphy's office after a month dubiously 
shook their heads and advised my wife to bring me home on 
the earliest possible train for Texas. That was tantamount to 
a death sentence from experts. It took my breath and un- 
nerved me. I sent for Dr. Johnston Myers, pastor of Im- 
manuel Baptist Church. His presence comforted me and his 
prayer of faith dammed up life's outflowing stream. The trip 
home was a fearsome experience and one long suspense. My 
wife and the porter nursed me all the way from Chicago to 
Saint Louis in the Pullman. Hot milk and strychnin kept a 



THE TRAGEDY OF A STRICKEN MAN 103 

spark of life in me. Any moment that I should have ceased to 
strive, I should have died. I fought harder for life than ever 
did the French to keep the Germans out of Paris. The desire 
for life within me was never so strong, the demands upon me 
were never so many, the prospects of usefulness never so 
bright, and the human reasons for living never so unanswer- 
able. At Saint Louis we were met by President T. C. Gardener 
of the College of Marshall. He had been sent by friends to 
take command in case of the dread eventuality. 

Even when my life hung by a thread, I still possessed a 
saving sense of the ridiculous. As I was being borne on a 
stretcher thru the great waitingroom at St. Louis to the Texas 
train, the crowds thru which we passed were smitten with 
amazement and sorrow at my forlorn estate. Some braver 
than the rest peered under the brim of my large Stetson hat 
which was over my face. They were evidently determined to 
see if I were alive. To prove my vitality I mischievously and 
maliciously winked at them, one and all. Yes, dear reader, I 
actually winked and sent the observers back to their seats, sur- 
prised but greatly relieved. 

The arrival home was unqualifiedly premonitory. A score 
of friends met the train to receive the sinking pastor. A re- 
porter came to the stateroom door, looked in upon me, and 
wrote of my precarious condition. The parsonage was filled 
with anxious and self-invited guests. Only three of our chil- 
dren and my mother were at home. The other children were 
scattered from Havana, Cuba, to Bryan, Texas. Prayer was 
made that I might live until they could gather around my bed- 
side. Great love was shown me by all classes and conditions 
and every rank and every sex and every race of the entire com- 
munity. One by one the children all came safely home and 
though my death was constantly imminent, it was not imme- 
diate. The marvel deepened and I did not die. 

Then the inevitable happened. I saw into the mysteries of 
the psychology of a people's grief. Folks like for their public 
men to get well or die quickly. Long sustained grief is impos- 
sible to the multitude and continuous interest of the masses in 
the case of one person is unthinkable. Some had made up their 
minds to have a great ecclesiastical funeral and they seemed to 
be piqued because I was so inconsiderate of their lugubrious 



104 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

whims as not to die. To this day they act as if they had been 
cheated out of something to which they had an unquestioned 
right. Disappointed expectancy wrought badly in their feel- 
ings toward me. To be denied the relief of an outburst of 
grief was to many oppressively stifling and they resented it. 
Even my little boy Francis, while sprawling on a lounge and 
eating in my room, said : ''Daddy, I bet if you die, you'll have a 
big funeral, for people on the train and everywhere are asking 
about you." 

In the fall when the matter of my longevity was still prob- 
lematical, it became necessary for me to be removed from the 
parsonage to give place to a successor who was able to preach. 
The church had been seized with a panic for its own safety and 
it was obsessed with the one thought of its own preservation. 
When my salary as pastor stopped, there was not a dollar in 
the treasury of any Baptist organization in Marshall, in Texas, 
in the South, or in the whole round world for a preacher in my 
condition. That has been the tragedy of being a Baptist 
preacher. I rejoice that the stigma is in process of removal 
and I am entertaining the comforting assurance that no other 
stricken minister shall ever pass through my Gethsemane of woe. 

On a bleak day of rain and mud in early November, in a 
borrowed ambulance I was carried from the parsonage to an 
unsightly old rented house, the only outside persons who aided 
in the transfer of my wrecked body were the ambulance driver 
and President C. H. Maxon of Bishop College, who with my 
second son looked after me on the inside. Our oldest son was 
in college and the next boy was a senior in the high school. 
Both could not have earned money enough to pay house rent 
and the upkeep of our dwelling. The world will never know 
how truly desperate was our plight. The financial outlook was 
the gloomiest in all our checkered career. We were even want- 
ing in some of the costliest and most necessary furnishings of 
a home. The shades to the windows and the gas kitchen range 
belonged to the parsonage. Every dollar we had ever possessed 
was gone, our credit was exhausted, and our prospects were as 
dark as an engulfing storm-cloud. Had it not been for the 
business-like intervention of a group of worldly and non-Baptist 
friends, I do not yet see how we should have escaped starva- 
tion. Mr. H. M. Price, a prominent Methodist and a journalist. 



THE TRAGEDY OF A STRICKEN MAN 105 

wrote two articles in his daily paper about me, and in answer 
my friends in the city gave me a never-to-be-forgotten pound- 
ing. One rich Jew presented us with a gas cooking-stove; 
another Jewish merchant carpeted the dining-room; window 
shades came from other sources; and food of great variety 
and abundance was generously put into our pantry ; and, upon 
the initiative of Mr. Frank Davis, banker and capitalist, a 
number of men covenanted together to put approximately a 
hundred dollars a month in the bank for my wife. This ar- 
rangement was expected to go on about a year and it did. In 
that length of time it was reasonable to believe that I should be 
either well or dead. This unprecedented liberality by friends 
outside of my former parish, while praiseworthy beyond the 
power of words to describe, is not surprising when it is re- 
membered that my congregations were a cosmopolitan crowd, 
and that the City of Marshall regarded me as the founder and 
promoter of one of its most substantial and promising enter- 
prises. To this day these same will do anything for me in their 
power. 

I lay prone upon my bed for one year. In all those months 
of suspense and anguish I was not dressed and I never had 
street clothes on until friends garbed me and held me in posi- 
tion on the back seat of a large automobile that I might make a 
brief and weak address at the breaking of dirt for the main 
building of the College of Marshall. I spoke twelve minutes 
and was carried home exhausted and limp. So tender was my 
flesh that the sun blistered my hands. But the hardy adventure 
gave me courage and inspired hope. And after that day in 
July, with growing frequency I was dressed and pushed down 
town in a roller chair. In November I made an address to the 
State Convention of Negro Baptists in the chapel of Bishop 
College. I had a tumultuous welcome and my words a hilarious 
reception. That afternoon a committee of stalwart colored men 
called at my room and presented me a bag containing twenty- 
five silver dollars, which they averred was in appreciation of 
my speech and in token of the love of the race for me. This 
is the very first money that I had made since the beginning of 
my bedridden condition, and I shall never cease to be grateful 
to my brethren in black. This is the story of how I was 
stricken and smitten and wounded. Other things are yet to be 
said and more tales are to be told. 



CHAPTER XX 
MY SOUL TORN BY THE GREAT WAR 

The assassination of the Austrian Archduke brought to 
mobiHzation Germany's fifty years of half stealthy assault 
upon the civilization of the ages. Under duress Austria was 
forced to exhume the bullet-pierced body of the heir to the 
throne and make the corpse a cause for war. The German 
thrust through Belgium was so irresistible, the long line of men 
in dusty grey so numberless, the pillaging so planned, the bru- 
tality so shockingly barbarous, the destruction so complete, and 
the rape of France so fiendishly systematic, and the whole army 
movement so thorough, and all on a scale of such stupendous 
magnitude, as to abash thought and wound imagination. 

I was at the lowest physical depths when the battle flare 
blazed over Europe. I was compelled to lie still and suffer, as 
half the planet was made one vast shambles. I closed my eyes 
and saw Belgium destroyed and France devastated. I saw the 
ash piles where proud universities had stood aiid the battered 
arches of cathedrals that had been the glory of the centuries. 
I saw chateaus of the rich and the noble pounded into dust. 
I heard the screams of unprotected women and children on the 
coast of England and even in the heart of London as they scur- 
ried to cellars to escape the deadly bombs from cloud-riding 
Zeppelins. The lurid flames of burning ships in channel and 
mid-ocean grew red on my sight as the submerged assassins of 
the sea did the bidding of their Hohenzollern masters. Cotton 
in the states went down to six cents and the German even de- 
stroyed industry, commerce, and the livelihood of millions in 
neutral and pacific America. The children cried in vain for 
toys and the aged and sick perished for want of delicacies and 
medicines. And the irksome restriction of all was that we 
were non-combatants, suffering the calamitous consequences of 
a war in which we could have no active participation. Our 
commerce was driven from the sea by the pirates of the deep. 
Our flag was insulted, our property was destroyed, and our 

106 



MY SOUL TORN BY THE GREAT WAR 107 

government was humbled in the person of its innocent interned 
citizens. Men who could read the letters of fire on the sky 
knew that America must some day be drawn in, but the Lusi- 
tania went down with its invaluable cargo of precious human 
freight and still we did not fight. Were the truth known, we 
could not fight, since at that time our country was over eighty 
per cent pacifist and German influences were dominant in more 
realms than we knew ; but at last when Paris was almost cap- 
tured, when England was exhausted and Italy was bleeding 
from a terrible beating, and Russia was disintegrating and 
changing front, patient America armed and quietly announced 
that she was going to see it through. 

There is no tongue that can tell the tale of this war's havoc. 
It is unquestionably the most sordid and sodden record of 
carnage in the annals of time. America came in with a swing, 
a preparation quick and vast, a purpose high, and with a soul 
white and clean ; but it was war she entered and the awful war 
of the Hun's own making. It was suffocating death from gas, 
shell-hole graves, incineration in the air, or desperate drowning 
in the icy seas. The parting with our boys was a wrench un- 
speakable. We were a land people and going to fight overseas 
was a new and stupefying experience. 

Then, too, the world was starving, and is yet. Forty mil- 
lions of men were engaged in destruction. When peace is 
finally established, America will have to send Jersey cattle to 
the Isle of Jersey, and Holstein to Holland. Then plagues 
always come in the wake of war. In Australia and New 
Zealand the sheep died by the millions, and in Argentina the 
beef-cattle perished on the pampas. In Texas the droughts 
claimed a fearful toll of livestock and the unprecedented sever- 
ity of the following winter froze what the heat had not con- 
sumed. Then our boys died by the thousands of pneumonia 
in the camps and later the influenza came to claim a million 
victims. But our country heroically paid the price and arrived 
at the front in time to save from destruction a quivering world. 
We were not in the battle's zone long, but we were there nu- 
merously and mightily. In all we have contributed a quarter 
million lives to stem the tide of Teutonic ferocity and to insure 
for democracy an open road. 

I do not share the opinion of many publicists and theolo- 



108 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

gians that this war will usher in the reign of righteousness. 
The problem of sin will remain when the last gun is fired. 
Neither do I think when our boys come home that they will all 
be transparent saints. Many of them will doubtless be changed 
for the better. Many more will be hospitable toward gospel 
truth, while some may be embittered and hardened. Neither do 
I think reconstruction and readjustment and rehabilitation will 
be accomplished with ease and celerity. For us all the rough 
road will be the route to the goal of peace and plenty again. I 
am not so sure about the speedy coming of a great revival of 
religion, but I am prayerful and hopeful. And there are not 
unpropitious signs in the moral skies. 

But let no man deceive himself. The mature men and 
women of this age will never be the same again. All are 
changed. In the welter of blood and hell of battle it could not 
be otherwise. Every serious and thoughtful person on the 
globe will be permanently saddened and millions of little chil- 
dren will not live long enough to get out from under the shadow 
of the great war. Privates are coming home seasoned, sedate, 
disillusioned, transformed. Chaplains and ministers have aged 
almost beyond recognition within a few months. Great gen- 
erals have utterly broken and retired to give place to younger 
men. Nurses who went in young have come out old. All has 
tragically changed. I doubt very gravely if the present gen- 
eration can ever again be hilarious or possessed with the noble 
rage of living. It shall be ours to rebuild the altar fires and 
glimpse the glory and sense the serenity of Him who said, "Be- 
hold, I make all things new." 

The one emerging lesson of supremest moment is that men 
from this world debacle shall learn the high values of the purely 
spiritual. Materialism has proved its impotency and may not 
the world come into its own in the realm of the unseen? 
Money-madness, pleasure-chasing, debauches of the most dar- 
ing sensual violence, were debasing and damning us all. Let 
us believe that the perdition of war with all its dread accom- 
paniments shall save us from the slime pits of sin and the bot- 
tomless gulf of moral turpitude into which we were slipping. 
And shall we not pray the God of all grace for an era of healing 
for the world and reconciliation for the torn souls whose blood 
is the sign of their agony? 



CHAPTER XXI 
LECTURING FROM A ROLLER CHAIR 

After being shut in a year and a half there was marked 
improvement in the muscular strength of my body. I was out 
in my chair nearly every day and I soon began to take out-of- 
town trips by automobile. It was a joy beyond expression 
when I found that I could speak from a rocking-chair in any 
auditorium. This I did a few times at least with great grati- 
fication to myself. Then I got business in my brain and estab' 
lished a little real estate office down town where I went daily 
for four or five months, and when spring and summer came 
I canvassed the county in a petty political campaign and went 
in a new Ford to every portion of the county. My campaign 
was intense, but the results were disastrous, for I was not 
elected. At this time I could drag around the room on crutches, 
but my leaden feet and twisted back and sleepless nights did 
not allow this temporary improvement to deceive me. I was 
actually called to two churches, to a village church for half 
time and to a country church for one-fourth time, and I 
preached for a year. My conveyance was a Studebaker road- 
ster more than half paid for by my brother. 

In the fall of our entrance into the war and when I saw I 
could no longer be a peripatetic preacher, I accidentally evolved 
some war lectures. My old church at Ruston was to dedicate 
the building and I was to speak on the high day of dedication 
when the house was consecrated to God and the notes of in- 
debtedness were burned. The trip was a fearsome one, since 
I had not been away from home at night for over three years 
and I was very cowardly concerning the outcome of the adven- 
ture. My wife went along as nurse and a football giant went 
to carry me in his arms and to roll me in my chair. This trip 
was so successful financially and socially and religiously that 
others were soon planned. And that is how it came about that 
from my wicker chair, given me by friends in Mansfield, Loui- 

109 



no TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

siana, I spoke to audiences all over Texas and Louisiana and 
a part of Arkansas. I even had return calls to many important 
places. My itinerary was oppr^^dvely hard even for a well 
man, and eight months of it was enough to destroy what strength 
I had accumulated during my bedridden days. I traveled from 
Sherman to Houston and from McKinney to Orange, from 
Longview to Beaumont and from Temple to Texarkana and 
Tyler too. I went from Lakes Charles to Monroe, Louisiana. 
I spoke to capacity houses and my remuneration was surpris- 
ingly large. Everywhere I met friends of former years and 
always I was greeted by converts of my ministry in other 
places. These were dear reunions and glorious trophies of 
the wonderful gospel even when poorly preached by me. My 
travels were one triumphal procession. I was conquering 
despite the most serious physical limitations that could be suf- 
fered by mortal man, and I was having poured upon me the 
devoted love of those whom I thought had forgotten me. I 
went to all my ex-pastorates in Louisiana and Texas but two ; 
and oh, such welcome and such tender love as were mine ! The 
good pastors of the land did me wonderful service and be- 
stowed upon me high honors. They threw wide the doors of 
their churches to me and then pried open the purses of their 
parishoners for me. 

Never was a decrepit pilgrim so caressed and so served by 
the choicest characters and sweetest souls of the earth as I was. 
Pastors put themselves out for my convenience and comfort 
and exerted every intelligent effort to give me a great hearing 
at every point. The Lord will reward these earnest and pious 
men for their unselfish and whole-hearted devotion to my needs. 
What a princely retinue of pastors follow in the train of Jesus 
Christ! How high their calling, how glorious their mission, 
how sweet their sacrifices, and how assuredly wonderful their 
destiny! From Dallas to Carthage the preachers gave way 
for me. It was worth all the pain to enjoy the fellowship of 
the saints and to feel that my messages were indeed a source 
of inspiration to fathers and mothers who had sent their sons 
overseas to die. And it was no little consolation to be told 
that I was making some worthy contribution to America's part 
in the great war. 

But I pressed too eagerly forward. The second Sunday in 



LECTURING FROM A ROLLER CHAIR 111 

June I had a veritable field day at Tyler. Then I came home 
and was forced oflf the platform until the second Sunday in 
July, when I went to Bryan and came near never getting home 
alive. Since that date I have not been out of town. My roller 
chair is vacant and lonely as the wind whips it up and down 
on the front porch. It is more than probable that I shall never 
speak from its friendly embrace again. It is reasonably sure 
that I have delivered my last lecture. More than a year and a 
half ago I received a love letter from Bishop H. C. Morrison 
of the Methodist Church, South, in which he said, **I have held 
my last conference and shall ask soon to be retired. And it 
will not be long until I shall try the realities of another world, 
but my brother, we shall meet again.*' So it is as my dear 
roller chair rumbles up and down the porch. It may be getting 
ready to bear me away where chairs will not be needed. But 
surely if I am so fortunate as by the blood of the Crucified 
One to enter the realms of bliss eternal, the Master will some 
day let me speak upon heaven's high themes with unfaltering 
tongue and unclouded brain. 



CHAPTER XXII 
THE HOPE THAT IS WITHIN ME 

One of the most heartbreaking and despairing stabs that 
drives its ruthless blades into mature consciousness, is the reali- 
zation that so soon as a man has sense enough to live he is either 
old enough or sick enough to die. But this is the philosophy 
of life and the penalty of sin. There is no remedy for it. 
There is the mystery of affliction. Occasionally there are wise 
ones who think they have parted the veil and entered the coun- 
cil chambers of eternal wisdom, but they deceive none but 
themselves. My long night of pain is a baffling problem as 
nonunderstandable as the book of Job. There have been bless- 
ings innumerable upon my heart and head and in my home, 
since my brow and frame were blasted. I have had a reve- 
lation of the wealth of the love of the living saints. In every 
conceivable way has this affection been shown. It has come in 
checks from Richmond to Dallas. Words of appreciation for 
my writings and for sermons of former years, and then just 
plain love letters from those who could do nothing but love. 
The mighty in the earth and the great in the Lord have been 
visitors at my bedside in my humble home, and probably the 
most blessed thing that has come to my own heart is that I have 
been forced to think and I have had time to love. The response 
in me has been eager and full and joyous has been the experi- 
ence. Then I have been compelled to contemplate the change 
awesome and inevitable that must come to us all, but especially 
soon to me who have been so long time the prisoner of Jesus 
Christ. It is usually not an entirely safe thing for an individual 
to speak of his innermost exercises and soul emotions. No man 
knows his own heart and how can he sound its depths so that 
others will understand? But there are some foundations and 
truths immovable and steadfast and there are experiences that 
shall not pass away. The word of the Lord remaineth sure 
and his judgments and righteousness altogether. My creed is 

112 



THE HOPE THAT IS V/ITHIN ME 113 

very brief and my theological system is as transparent as the 
New Testament. The atonement of Jesus Christ was my theme 
when I preached and his unmerited grace is my hope now, my 
ground for a favorable issue at judgment, and the basis of my 
anticipation of entering into the joy of my Lord. In my own 
name I have not a single claim on divine favor. Of myself I 
am utterly lost and undone. 

"In my hand no price I bring. 
Simply to Thy cross I cling." 
"Nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness can avail for 
me. 

The sky line is not always clear, neither has the vision 
always been cloudless. I have had to fight for my faith ever 
as I have fought for my life. Not an hour for five years have 
I been in bodily ease and my disease was such as to make terr 
rible inroads upon mind and soul. But the story of my suffer- 
ings can never be told and ought never be told. In weakness 
beyond conception and pain all but unbearable I am dictating 
this last chapter of my little book. I am pressing to my own 
heart the precious truths I have preached so often to others, 
and while I have no spiritual exhilaration and no buoyant, 
bounding soul throbs, I am resting in Him who carries the 
lambs in His bosom and whose Father willeth that not one of 
these little ones should perish. "Rock of Ages cleft for me, 
let me hide myself in Thee." "In the Cross of Christ I glory, 
towering o'er the wrecks of time, gathering harvests rich and 
golden, sown in poverty and tears." And in the faith that I 
shall gather round the throne and see the King some day, I 
lay my twisted hand in His pierced palm and lay my tired head 
on His love-torn heart. 



CHAPTER XXIII 
THE AUTHOR'S DEATH 

[On the very day that the manuscript of this book was mailed 
to the printer the author died. After he had gone I wrote to his 
bereaved wife and asked her to write a closing chapter, thus giving 
an account of his closing hours. This she has done in the words 
that follow.— J. B. C] 

On February 24, 1919, about three weeks after the last 
words of this little book were dictated, the author fell asleep. 
He had fought a good fight. The Apostle Paul could not 
have had a harder nor a longer battle than his. For five long 
years this man of colossal energy had been a helpless invalid. 
For a year and a half, after all medical skill had been ex- 
hausted, even by the world renowned Doctor Murphy, of 
Chicago, he lay upon his bed unable so much as to hold a 
piece of bread in his hand. During this time, with the aid of 
a stenographer, he wrote constantly, producing some of his 
best articles. Then his health improved and he accepted 
the pastorates of two churches — one in a little town near by 
and the other in the country. After serving these for awhile 
he found that by having a strong Negro man to lift him, he 
could go from city to city and this he did, delivering his war 
lectures to great crowds. 

In June, 1918, however, he again became too feeble to be 
carried away from home. On Friday before Christmas his 
trouble became more acute and his suffering more intense, 
and from that time until the end he was able to sit up during 
only a small portion of each day. Surely the three younger 
children will never forget how on Christmas Eve he sat in 
the shadow of their gaily decorated tree and told them again 
the Christmas story, adding that before another Christmas 
he would leave them, and then in a most beautiful prayer 
he commended each of them to the keeping of Him whom he 
had so faithfully served. 

After Christmas he began what might be called a race 

114 



THE AUTHOR^S DEATH 115 

with Death. Long had he planned to write his Auto- 
biography that he might inspire others to bravely battle 
against great odds and at the same time leave a source of 
income for his wife and little children. Some days he would 
be too weak to dictate more than a few paragraphs. Again 
he could write a chapter or more a day. But always with the 
question : "Shall I live to finish it?" So great was his belief 
in prayer that he sent out appeals to friends and churches 
who were very dear to him asking them to pray that he 
might be spared to finish the work on which he had so set 
his heart. At last the book was completed and when he 
knew it was in the hands of the publishers he said, "It is 
finished. I have lived to see my dream, the College of 
Marshall, come true; I have seen the close of the greatest 
of wars ; my two lieutenant boys have come home ; my little 
book is done — why should I pray to live longer in this 
tortured and twisted old body that cries for rest?" Often 
would he quote from Kipling's "L'Envoi" : 

"We shall rest for an aeon or two and, faith! we shall 
need it." 

The second week in February he enjoyed a six days' visit 
from his Lieutenant-Commander brother, who he had not 
seen for five years. Then he seemed to grow more and 
more feeble and on a calm, bright day a little after noon he 
quietly went to sleep in the Master's arms to wake on the 
farther shore. 

Colonel Roosevelt's death a few weeks before had made a 
marked impression on him. It was such a marvel to him 
that that tumultuous soul should pass out so quietly. He 
had often spoken also of how Cromwell's death had seemed 
more fitting when an awful storm raged around his palace 
that night. But this equally tumultuous and storm-tossed 
soul slipped away even more quietly. As he had wished, 
there was no moaning of the bar when he put out to sea. 

The next morning a most beautiful service was held over 
his casket in the handsome auditorium of the College for 
which he had practically given his life. Among those who 
gathered to pay their last tribute of respect were a number 
of his colored friends whom he had loved and to whom he 
had often brought messages of cheer. 



116 TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS 

That afternoon loving hands laid him to rest in beautiful 
Greenwood Cernetery, at Longview, beneath a wealth of 
flowers. Surely he has seen his *Tilot face to face" since he 
"has crossed the bar." 



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